We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve added Santogold’s debut album to Popcuts today! If you don’t know her yet: She’s the hot shit – her sound has been compared with M.I.A., but it’s actually much more versatile than that (for a more upbeat track, check out L.E.S. Artistes).
For those of you in the Bay Area: She’s playing at The Fillmore tonight (Tuesday)! Catch us there!
The first is aimed at making your browsing and shopping experience smoother: A shopping cart. Anywhere on the site, clicking the buy button now drops a song into your shopping cart – without reloading the page so there’s minimum distraction. You don’t even have to be logged in to start shopping, so the site is even more inviting to new users now. Needless to say, this is going to be very helpful for our power users who buy ten songs at once as well as the occasional shopper!
The other is a feature our artists have been requesting a lot: Popcuts artists can now delete or temporarily disable songs from their artist dashboard. In addition, audio files for a given song can be replaced with a newer version. This is particularly helpful to those bands who want to put their releases out there early but may get a better master at a later point. All users who’ve already purchased a song can always download the latest file.
We hope you like it, and we’re eager to hear your feedback!
We’re excited to announce that we’ve entered a content partnership with DashGo, Inc., a Santa Monica-based distributor of indendent music. The partnership will bring thousands of new tracks to the Popcuts music store and includes music from labels such as Delicious Vinyl and Rock Ridge Music. We will be rolling out the DashGo catalog over the next few weeks, featuring hot artists like Santogold, Carla Bruni, The Pharcyde, and Coconut Records.
Stay tuned here for release dates, so you can grab these songs right when they come out!
Wow. Popcuts began life in California, and after a stellar three months in Cambridge, MA for YCombinator, we’re happy to be back in the Bay Area.
In the past three months, we’ve packed up and moved twice, met dozens of artists and fans, flown crazy miles, and written a ton of code. In Boston, we caught some great live shows. !!! brought the house down in Boston, and Tim Gearan Band is a Monday night legend over at Somerville’s Toad. Those Fourth of July fireworks ain’t bad either.
And in the meanwhile, lots of you guys may’ve seen us in the paper, on the blogosphere, or even out on the street (thanks to all the Popcuts fans who’ve met up with us in the Bay Area, Boston, NYC… even in Berlin!).
The blog’s been quiet, but we’ve been working on lots of things that you’ll see coming down the pipeline soon! We are about to roll out some big features, for artists and fans alike. We’re doing deals which will bring TONS of music to our store, and expand the “playground” just for you and your fellow music lovers. We’ve been talking to some cool people, like the geniuses over at last.fm, Reddit, and some other people who are interested in helping Popcuts grow. Users like you are streaming us feedback and encouragement every day, so keep it coming!
In the meantime, check out this awesome video, by an amazing California artist, Jack Conte:
Today, we rolled out a newly designed user interface for Popcuts. We think of it as a major improvement that should make everything easier to find and support more functionality. Take a look at popcuts.com and tell us what you think!
Speaking of functionality, we’ve been adding numerous features and little improvements that we’ve included in this release. For example:
Watchlists for everything: Ever come across a song you really like, but won’t buy yet? See an interesting artist you wanna keep track of? A user that has the same taste as you? Put them on your watchlist by clicking the little gray dot on the detail page and have everything and everyone you’re watching in one place.
Genre-based navigation: This was obviously still to come - browsing through our catalog by genres. We built landing pages for every musical genre we have, so you can check what’s new and interesting to you, e.g. by going to www.popcuts.com/genres/pop.
Search: We’ve enlisted Google for our new site search. Try it out: www.popcuts.com/search
Recently, Popcuts heard some wise words from Pandora founder Tim Westergren. It was really cool to hear some motivational words from tim, because a few years ago, Pandora kick-started a music revival in my life.
Tim managed to talk about some classic issues in the online music space, without resorting to the same old arguments.
Tim talked about finding a “win-win model” for the music business, and the need to “end the adversarial relationship between music rights-owners and listeners.” It’s been something Popcuts has noticed from day one: why aren’t artists and fans on the same team?
Tim went on to slam DRM for a new reason: people just “don’t get it.” The user experience of DRM is just strange and counterintuitive. Instead of inventing confusing technologies to fix complicated and shifting problems, he set a simpler goal for the music tech geek: “make simple and easy ways to be a fan.”
