In our latest release, we made some significant changes to the user leaderboards on Popcuts. Our primary view now shows who’s been doing particularly well recently (that is, which of our users have earned the most rewards in the last month). We did this mainly to make it easier for newcomers to get noticed and emphasize that everyone can profit from buying cool songs early!
In addition, we now have a view called “Smartest Buyers” where we show those that have the best spending-earning ratio.
We’re curious to hear your feedback on the revised People page, and we’re always open to suggestions and ideas, especially if they enable our users to get a better view of our data!

Team Popcuts

We’re happy to announce we’ve entered into a partnership with United For Opportunity, a label and distributor out of New York City.  UFO is a ground-breaking group of activists who have broken the old mold of record label.

We’ll be rolling out the UFO Music catalog over the next months, starting with some great stuff by cutting edge new artists as well as some classics that are just begging to be rediscovered by fans new and old.  We’ve got music by jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, R&B star Luther Vandross and sensational hip-hop artist Nate Dogg.

Here’s a photo of Dizzy being Dizzy:

And of our most exciting artists is Celtic rock band Enter The Haggis.  Check out “Lancaster Gate” off their album “Soapbox Heroes.”

That’s all for now, we’re always on the lookout for new music that you’ll love.  So stay tuned.

With spring kicking in in full force, let us give you an update on some exciting new releases on Popcuts:

Just in time for the Lost season finale, we’ve added Operation Aloha, a joint venture by members of Maroon 5, Gomez and Phantom Planet, among others. A total of 14 musicians met up in Hawaii in between tours to record their self-released and self-titled debut.

Staying in line with our beach theme, also just released: The Beach Girl5’s self-titled debut!

Geared at the younger audience, The Beach Girl5 consists of Mandy Jiroux (best known as a featured dancer for Miley Cyrus and star of YouTube’s “The Miley and Mandy Show”), Brooke Adams, Dominique Domingo, Noreen Juliano, and Laura New, with songs produced by the hit-making music team of Antonina Armato and Tim James (Miley Cyrus, Mariah Carey).

On the other coast, Aaron LaCrate has been promoting Baltimore’s sound into the world for years. His latest track is a wonderful breaky remix of The Pharcyde’s Soul Flower.

Enjoy!

Welcome back to our second installment of Best of SXSW, our roundup of cool people we met in Austin!

After Accelerator, we celebrated for a bit at Habana. Only, I had no idea what anything on the menu was, so we kept changing our orders quite a bit. Luckily, we had Molly Ryan as our waiter. She didn’t care, and demonstrated extreme patience with the SXSW crowd.

So Molly was one of the first to receive an award, the Popcuts Award for Extreme Patience!

One of the first shows we saw at SXSW Music was Themselves at the Red Seven. Fun stuff. Outside, we met a couple of pretty serious media people. For instance, music blogger Dave Evans, who was wearing a camera that could easily hold three cans of PBR.

So Dave earned the Largest Camera award.

On Wednesday morning, we had coffee with Alexis from Reddit. And we couldn’t help but notice this awesome hot dog hat he was wearing.

So the award for Best Hat goes to Alexis! Congratulations.

Later that night, we headed over to Tiniest Bar in Texas, which quickly also became our favorite bar in Texas. Not only did we love the setup: a tiny shack with an outdoor area crammed between condo skyscrapers popping up everywhere around. We also loved some of the Southern electro bands that later played there: Roy G And The Biv from Denton, Texas, Culture Prophet from North Carolina, and Glasnost from Houston.

In the audience, we met Arriel. When he first bragged about his dancing skills, we didn’t believe him and dared him to a dance-off.

But it turned out he wasn’t lying. To the contrary - Arriel sure did rock everyone’s face off. So the Popcuts Award for Rocking Everyone’s Face Off goes to Arriel. Well done!

And one more outfit award: When we visited the Whole Foods flagship store in Austin, we spotted Trixie at the salad bar and noticed her awesome cowboy boots. We tracked her down in front of the store and handed her the award for Best Cowboy Boots. She was excited!

That’s it for today. We’ll be back with more Best of SXSW this weekend. Enjoy your day!

Well, that was fun. SXSW is over, and boy, we had a good time. Not only did we win Accelerator, we also caught a ton of cool shows, and met some incredibly nice and interesting people there.

Looks like everyone’s doing a Best of SXSW writeup, so here is ours:

We noticed everyone at SXSW is basically just trying to get noticed. By being on or hosting panels, by playing shows, or by wearing funny hats. Of course, some ways to get noticed are more amusing than others, and we thought we’d honor some of these.

So we decided to hand out individual Best of SXSW awards to noteworthy people. And this post is the first in a series that documents the winners. Stay tuned for more!

(Example of our awards. They come with a free song.)

This is Bridget, one of the throng of helpful SXSW volunteers:

After panels ended, it was usually time to head over to the Registrant’s Lounge across the street from the Austin Hilton, which was basically a fenced-off park with free booze for badgeholders. Good place to unwind, think about something other than blogging and social media for a change, and get some sun for the first time in the day.

Too bad it only opened at 5pm. But not to worry - there was Bridget, who let us in early because she was just nice like that. She also hooked us up with an extra drink coupon. So the Popcuts Award for Best SXSW Staff / Volunteer was an easy choice for us!

Veteran music recommendation researcher Paul Lamere (ex Sun Labs, now with the Echo Nest) led a panel named “Help! My iPod thinks I’m emo!”. It was both insightful and hilarious at times. Our favorite slide was his example of what a “freakommendation” is: People who buy Pat Robertson’s book also shopped for The Ultimate Guide for Anal Sex for Men.

So Paul totally earned the Popcuts award for Most Hilarious Panelist.

For the very last timeslot of SXSW Interactive, we headed to a roundtable discussion titled Music 2.0 = Music Discovery Chaos? Also in the audience was Tim Malbon, who caught our attention because he dared to ask the question of questions (and we have to paraphrase here): “Is music discovery really such a huge problem? I don’t see people running around on the street screaming ‘I can’t discover new music!’”.

So Tim got our award for Ballsiest Question to a Panelist.

Speaking of music recommendation: A few months ago in Berlin, we ran into Petar Djekic at the booth of a cool new music recommendation startup called mufin. We saw Petar again here at SXSW and hung out for a while. And after getting us into Berlin Fest (which featured free beer and sausages), and giving us tips on a ton of other fun stuff, we decided Petar deserves the  award for Extreme Generosity.

At Berlin Fest, we met Judith Govey from the British Music Embassy. Their mission is to promote British music in the rest of the world, which sounds like a pretty kickass thing to do. Judith received our award for Most Pieces of Flare because we noticed she was wearing way more than the minimum of 17! Because Judith knows that people can get a song anywhere. She even gave us a button to keep.

We’ll be posting more of the award-winning people we met in Austin!  Signing off from Berkeley!

We’re thrilled to announce that Popcuts was declared winner of the music category at SXSW Accelerator yesterday! The jury found Popcuts most likely to succeed and disrupt the current music distribution landscape.

The contest was hosted by former Wired editor Brad King and by Guy Kawasaki. Judges included iLike CEO Ali Partovi and Elliott Hurst of supernova.com.

SXSW Accelerator was designed to discover the best young talent and the most creative new ideas. Other category winners include Weardrobe (social networking), TubeMogul (online video) and Ribbit (innovative web technologies).

For press inquiries, please contact press@popcuts.com.

Photo gallery of Popcuts at the award ceremony (courtesy of the Austin American-Statesman)

This morning, we released an all-new, shiny user interface for Popcuts. We’ve spiced up the look and implemented lots of little and big improvements to usability, functionality and performance.

The general site structure stays the same, but the new look gives us a foundation to roll out new features over the next couple of months.

One thing we’ve learned is that it’s a lot more fun to browse music by looking at cover art. So we increased the size of song covers in our list views and put a cover zoom function everywhere. Still to come: An entirely, cover-based section to browse music.

We unified the way the rewards for a given song are presented: In the new version, a little dollar icon next to the preview button brings up a table with a “profit preview” for the song.

For those who like to buy whole albums, we’ve added a shortcut for that.

By popular request, we moved an overview of the newest releases to front page. And we added a news ticker with the most recent user events there, too (such as reviews, purchases, recommendations etc.). Now, you can get a sense of what’s going on on the site just by glancing at the Popcuts front page.

Finally, we brought back an old favorite of ours: the slightly tilted logo. In combination with the dancing equalizer bars, we feel it’s much more suited for a site that’s all about music.

We thank you, our users, for all your support and hope you enjoy the new site! And do let us know if you’ll be at SXSW!

Team Popcuts

P.S.: Thanks, Simon Beckmann, for laying down the design vision, implementing countless screens, navigating around IE6 hell and just being of great help!

As you may have heard, we made it into the final four contestants in the music category of SXSW Accelerator, a new kind of technology showcase, similar to Demo or TC 50. The “event showcases some of the web’s most exciting new innovations, enabling the entrepreneurial visionaries behind these new products to demo their creations in front of a live audience of industry professionals and technology trend-settters.” (sxsw.com)

Are you going to Austin this year? Let us know! Because we’d love to meet our fans, artists, and partners.

Also, we’re compiling a list of Popcuts artists who are performing during SXSW. Here are a few we could find, so expect to see us there!

• The Webb Sisters: March 19, Creekside at Hilton Garden Inn (http://www.thewebbsisters.com/tourdates.html)
• The Kin: March 18-21 (http://www.thekin.com/tour.asp)
• Recorder: March 19-21 (http://www.myspace.com/recorder)

See you in Austin!

Team Popcuts

Last winter, we asked for your feedback in an extensive survey. We’ve gathered lots of insightful responses, and we’re currently working to incorporate many of the findings into our new design, which is due live next month.

As promised, we did draw one lucky respondant in a raffle for our prize of 20 songs on Popcuts. The winner has been notified. Congratulations!

We’d like to thank everyone who participated and hope to see you back on our site soon!

Team Popcuts

Today, we’ve rolled out a little feature that may just be what you need right before the holidays.

At www.popcuts.com/gift, you can issue Popcuts gift certificates for your loved ones, so they can find the music they love and make a little profit from their good taste.

Gift certificates can be given to existing Popcuts users or to anyone else, and they come in all kinds of sizes. So give a little love to that distant relative / coworker / classmate / cute girl or guy you’re too shy to add on Facebook.

Enjoy your holidays!

Team Popcuts