Hey all,

We just launched a few updates to the tools promoters use to review submissions.  When an artist makes a submission on Sonicbids, it ends up the the promoter’s Submission Inbox and Viewer which you can see in the screenshots below (click to enlarge).

Promoters now have the ability to customize the columns that appear so if they don’t want to see a band’s specified genre or location they can remove it from view.

We also took this opportunity to optimize the performance of the Inbox and Viewer so promoters that have a lot of submissions should notice a bit of a decrease in load times.

Lastly for our promoters who ask for specific songs as part of their review process they now have a handy flash player that will play each song in their Inbox from top to bottom.

As always if you have any feedback, ideas or suggestions feel free to comment here or hit me up on Twitter at http://twitter.com/SonicbidsLou

Rock on,

Lou

You may have noticed a new button on your artist homepage that says “Sell My Merch.” Wondering what that’s all about? Well, we’ll tell you. Sonicbids has partnered with on-demand merch provider Zazzle to make it easier for you to sell your merch to fans.

Here’s the deal.

When you click on the “Sell My Merch” button in your artist account, you can head over to Zazzle to set up your online storefront – it’s totally free.

You can upload your band’s logo and design whatever kind of merch you’d like to sell – T-shirts, stickers, posters… or anything else you can think of. It’s easy. Seriously.

Then you can put a link to your store on your website, MySpace or Facebook pages, and anyplace else. If your fans want to order merch, they can do it straight from your Zazzle storefront. Zazzle ships it straight to them, and you get a percentage of the sale.

And, if you want to order merch for an upcoming show, you can order whatever you need – however few or many.

Check it out!

P.S. You can still find your EPK Stats under your Dashboard Feed.

We launched some great changes to how you receive emails from us late summer – we’ve been listening to your feedback and working to make it even better!  Here are some of the updates that launched today:
Gig Alert Preferences

• We changed your default preferences so that you get gigs relevant to your band’s location and your primary AND secondary genres. Remember, you can change these at anytime by going to your Artist Account –> Gig Notifications on the left side of the page.

• We streamlined the page so it’s easier to make sure you have the right preferences and will therefore get the right gigs sent to you

Daily Digest Changes

• We’ve included more information in the digests to help you make a decision

• We’ve separated the content into two different digests: one is a digest of Today’s Last Chances- these include gigs that have close deadlines; the other is a digest of Today’s New Gigs – these include gigs posted on Sonicbids in the past couple of days.

Design & Content Updates

• Made some small changes so there is more consistency in the design, allowing you to focus on the important content that will help you find the right gigs for you.

Artists might have noticed a couple links missing from the left hand nav on their My Account page. We removed the links to “Manage My Credit Cards”, “Gift Certificates/Credits” and “Have a promo code?” and bundled the various things they do under a redesigned “My Membership Info” page.

This makes the navigation on the My Account page simpler and makes it easier to manage the various aspects of your membership (renewal plan, payment method, promo codes, etc.) all in one place.

As always feel free to leave your feedback in the comments or drop me a line on Twitter.

Lou

We recently announced some big changes to our homepage and email were coming.  Well as of today they have arrived.

New Homepage

The homepage at www.Sonicbids.com has been given a new look with a much bigger artist spotlight.  If you’ve got great music, nice hi-res photos, and a great EPK and are interested in being featured on our new homepage you can submit your EPK for free here.

Email Settings

We’ve totally overhauled our email program to give you more control over the type of gigs you’re alerted about.  After logging into your account head to the new “Gig Notifications” section to make sure you’re set to receive alerts about the types of gigs you care about.   We set everyone up with default settings so you don’t miss anything, but they can be easily adjusted if you feel you’re getting too many or too few alerts.
As always, let us know what you think! (more…)

We’ve got some big changes coming soon and wanted to give everyone a sneak peak.

More Control Over Your Email Preferences
Only want to hear about gigs looking for Funk bands? Or only interested in gigs located in Canada?  Maybe you don’t want to be notified about live gigs at all.  Our new “Gig Notifications” area will let you pick the exact types of gigs you want to be alerted about and how often you’d like to be alerted.
To start, we’ll default your Gig Notification preferences based on your current email settings, as well as your account’s genre and location, but you can change them at any time.

Homepage Updates
We’ve given the Sonicbids homepage a little makeover. You’ll see the fresh new look in the near future. Your login will maintain its home in the upper-right hand corner and you can “Find Gigs” straight from the top navigation (and, as always, from within your “My Account” page by clicking on the orange “Find Gigs” button at the top of that page).

For a long time Sonicbids artists have been using the Email My EPK tool on Sonicbids to send their EPK to folks inside of a nicely formatted HTML email.  You will now be able to see when an emailed EPK has been opened.

The details

When you send out a new message with the Email My EPK tool, you now have the option of getting an email alert when the message is opened.

If you go to the “Sent Items” tab, you will be able to see a list of all your past emails along with the date they were sent and the date they were opened if it’s available.

The techy explanation of how it works

We’ve added a simple tracking pixel to emailed EPKs which will record when the email is opened. Keep in mind that like all email tracking pixels, the recipient will need to have images enabled in their email for the tracking pixel to work.

Let us know what you think

As always we’d love to hear your feedback.  Feel free to post a comment here or contact me on Twitter.