Magnatune blog

More album art on magnatune pages

As mentioned yesterday, the new magnatune home page launched today, but there are a few other changes. Specifically, the top-charts pages in /info/stats now all feature album art.

For example, on the home page, the top 10 albums are listed, with a link to the top 50, which now looks like this:

the references to "best selling" and "highest paid" on each artist's page (in the margin)

link to the statistics pages. The highest paid page also got a makeover:

as did the top-sellers-by-genre page:

However, I'm thinking of changing the home page, so that instead of a top-10 listing, there is:
- top 5 sellers, 1 for each major genre
- 5 staff picks, 1 for each major genre

that way we're not as weighted toward the top genres (classical/ambient) and show more variety of genres on the home page, and we also can feature albums that we think are special but don't get heard much.

-john

new magnatune home page in a day or two

Still a few more things to work out, but here's the new home page that I'm about to roll out.

Changes:

- mission statement moved to a separate page instead of front
- "why we're better" will be bulleted page of differentiators (ie, 50/50 for musicians, no DRM, WAV files, etc)
- prominent licensing link at top left
- and of course, the top 10 sellers, rotated daily

We went through a few drafts of possible radical changes, but I chose not to change too much for right now, and instead of a big sweeping change, make smaller incremental changes. With a complete home page redo, it's hard to get all the major changes right in one pass.

Best-selling album (covers) on the home page?

Based on some of the feedback on the home page, I've modified the home page to feature the top 12 best-selling albums, and their covers.

This is what this new home page looks like:

I'm not yet sure I want commit this to the "live" home page at Magnatune, and was looking for feedback/thoughts on this first.

-john