Commercial-lite

I'm continuing to experiment with the amount of "please join" reminders that are played when you listen for free.

This week, all our releases have no reminders at all for their first 20 minutes (they're totally ad-free, pure music), and afterwards there is a short (under 15 second) reminder at the end of each song from 20 minutes in until the end of the album. There are no "magnatune" watermarks in the songs at all as there have been for the past month.

In a few days, all albums at Magnatune will be commercial-"lite" like this. About half are at the moment: it takes about 10 days to redo the mixes for all the albums when I change the parameters.

So… if you enjoy any of our albums, forward a url to your friends and let them listen with very few commercial interruptions.

This commercial-"lite" experiment will continue for a month, as I'm curious to see if fewer ads leads to more member signups, as more people tell their friends about our music due to the softer-sell.

-john

Comments

[Pedro M. Rosario Barbosa]

I like this idea better. I have no statistics with me, but I definitely like this better.

[Joseph]

Good to hear. Those watermarks drive me bonkers. I don't mind the commercial interruptions so much.

I'm a download member, so the only reason this really affects me is due to two things: the Flash widget to listen and the ease with which I'm auto-logged-out.

gnash doesn't work with the site when I'm logged in, although it works fine when I'm not. Because of the numerous Flash bugs and the rather... lackluster security history, I'd be much happier with gnash over Adobe's player.

The second is perhaps the most annoying. The website likes to log me out fairly regularly. I think it's because of the magnatune.com and download.magnatune.com difference. I've noticed (and reported) the lack of the latest newsletters (I love the newsletters, and want to view them on the site instead of just in the email) after I've logged in to the site.

[elwin]

I've been watching all the recent Magnatune improvements, and this one finally got me to renew my membership. Success to Magnatune and its artists!

[Karl]

This seems like a better way to handle ads. I'd be interested to read a followup report about changes to site activity and subscriptions as a result of the ad change.

[Conrad]

I agree with the above. Thank you for taking our comments into consideration, and good luck with finding the sweet-spot of revenue vs. popularity :).

Also — I find myself liking the musical interjections, though they can be amusingly incongruous.

[Spike Page]

Thank you!

I'm a download member, but for the past year I have made it a point to link to a favourite album on my Facebook account almost every day because a) I love the music and want to share and b) hope to convince a few others to sign up.

I mentioned here once before that a visitor cannot truly appreciate Magnatune until they've explored the catalog, and I believe the watermarks might discourage such exploration and possibly turn visitors away before they ever got the chance to fall in love with the music.

Thanks again for listening to us.

[David Orme]

I just became a lifetime member.

I'd all but walked away from Magnatune due to being able to find enough music that fit my taste before getting annoyed by the in-music advertising. The current mix suits my taste fine, so I decided to vote with my dollars. :)

Thanks for making Magnatune what it is today!

Dave

[Erick]

Wow, there's some Indian-like female singer... Magnatu Magnatu Magnatu Magnatu Magnatune dot coooooooom!!!. OMG It's forcing me to become a paid member!!!! I simply cannot stand sing mediocrity at these levels. Bob gable sounds funny and sympathetic.

[MaTT]

I am curious about how this experiment ended up ?

cheers