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ewtI wonder what sort of subscription service I could hang off the website.... something for £2-4-ish/month. Possibly access to higher-quality MP3 files? Possibly getting rid of some sort of download limit?
Is this a terrible, doomed idea, or a quite good one?
I don't want to bug everyone to sign up for premium service all the time, because, hey, sucks. I don't want a huge gulf between the free services and the paid-for-services - everything we sell has to be free in some format and should be easily accessible. However, as the site gains popularity, having some kind of subscription service might be an easy way to gain revenue for the artists and make sure our costs are covered.
I need to think about money transfer and how that is going to work, too. PayPal? WorldPay? Something else? Why? If we do something by subscription, will that be the same or can people use a Standing Order if they're in the UK?
Is this a terrible, doomed idea, or a quite good one?
I don't want to bug everyone to sign up for premium service all the time, because, hey, sucks. I don't want a huge gulf between the free services and the paid-for-services - everything we sell has to be free in some format and should be easily accessible. However, as the site gains popularity, having some kind of subscription service might be an easy way to gain revenue for the artists and make sure our costs are covered.
I need to think about money transfer and how that is going to work, too. PayPal? WorldPay? Something else? Why? If we do something by subscription, will that be the same or can people use a Standing Order if they're in the UK?
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Date: 2006-12-25 08:29 am (UTC)Hardcopy is alway going to cost money, but maybe you use the preminum service as a garauntee of income so lower the hardcopy cost for premium customers.
Erms and I can provide a certain amount of bandwidth and diskspace, because we're already paying for a base line and not using all of it. A premium ad-free version of the site sounds a nice way to cover the bandwidth costs, possibly with hardcopy thrown in for good measure... I don't quite know how much bandwidth you're likely to need, but I will be able to measure usage. I can get ~£7 per month for 1Mbit/sec, ~160G of downloads per month, and 10Gig of diskspace, I can easily add more to this if required. I don't know Erm's costs. Oh and a org/com domain will cost just under £10 per year.
As for payment, I would strongly advise against something like standing orders, it exposes account details which should be kept safe. Outsource it to someone who knows what they're doing like paypal, only consider something more complex like direct cc payments once you are established.