Holiday greetings from the Popcuts Team!
Today we're pleased to announce Popcuts for Causes.
Now when you buy a song, that song can raise money for the cause or charity of your choice. Popcuts has always given money back to fans, but now we're letting fans "pay it forward" to those in need.
It's simple: just find a song you love, and at checkout, select an organization to sponsor. After that, your Popcuts rewards for that song will go into the fund for that cause, along with others' donations. Every time we hit $5, we'll cut a check and notify the fans who made a difference.
For the holidays, you can even make a Popcuts for Causes gift purchase! Music can be that great gift. And donating money on someone's behalf is really cool too. Now your Popcuts purchase can be the best of both.
For right now, we've begun our giving campaign with four awesome organizations:
Kiva.org - A cutting edge organization for good, connecting people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.
DonorsChoose.org - An online charity that makes it easy to help students through donations to individual teacher's projects.
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!
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!
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
Hey guys, check it out! Popcuts is honored to receive an Internet Retailer Hot 100 Award. Internet Retailer gave us an award in the Books, Film & Music category.
We're thrilled to be recipients of this award, alongside great businesses like Borders, Blockbuster and iTunes.
Check out the full Top 100 here: Link
And their piece on Books, Film & Music: Link
There's still plenty of work to do, so we're not going to stop to gloat. But thanks to all who nominated us and encourage us to keep going every day.
We've rolled out a couple of new things today:
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! [gallery]
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:
