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.

A few months ago, we added ratings and reviews to gig listings to help artists make more informed submissions. Since then, we’ve been getting great feedback on the process from both artists and promoters. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be making a couple of updates to the rating/review system based on that feedback. Here’s a look at what’s going to change:

We’re now allowing promoters time to finish their submission reviews before opening their listing for feedback.

When the reviews first launched, anyone who submitted could review the gig, even before they got a status update from the promoter. Starting today, gigs will not be open for reviews until after their Submission Tracker notification date (or 1 month after the submission deadline for gigs not using Submission Tracker). Artists who have questions about a submission and are unable to reach the promoter directly can get help from our Member Relations team at http://www.sonicbids.com/support.

And coming soon… Just launched

Easy way to Update Ratings/Reviews.

Previously there was no easy way to go back and revise a rating or review that’s been posted. Now you will be able to append an update to a previous review.

Easy way for promoters to reply.

Promoters can leave comments on their gig listing. In most cases, they’re replying to feedback left by an artist, but the way the review system was setup, it was hard to keep track of the conversation. Promoters are now able to reply directly to a specific review. Their reply will always be attached to the artist’s comment so it’s easier to read in context.

We’ll keep you in the loop right here on the Builder’s Blog when more changes go live. If you’ve got any feedback about these changes to the rating/review process let us know by posting here or drop me a line on Twitter.

We’ve just added a new plugin that will let artists link their Sonicbids and MySpace accounts.  The MySpace Plugin will allow you to:

• Track your MySpace friend count (along with your Last.fm stats, and Google and Twitter Buzz) all in one place.
• Show promoters your band’s MySpace friend count without them having to leave your submission.

We’re hoping to expand the capabilities of the MySpace plugin to get more data on things like song plays and page views if they become available through MySpace’s API.

If you’ve got feedback on the MySpace Plugin and/or suggestions on what else you’d like to see integrated with Sonicbids leave a comment here or shoot me a message on Twitter.

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We’re continuing to improve on the new “Find Gigs” section and, today, we introduced a few changes based on your feedback:

• We hear all the time that you want us to tell you about more gigs that are relevant to you. So we’re asking you to help us and making it easy for you to do that. Now you can give a gig listing a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” from right within the ”Find Gigs” section. Gig listings that you give a “thumbs up” to will be added to your “Favorites” section, and we’ll send you a friendly reminder when the deadline is coming up. This will save you some  time and a whole lot of mental energy trying to remember all of that. Oh, and you can manage these reminders from within the “Favorites” section of your account.

• Some of you were confused by the dates of the gig listings, so we fixed that too. Now, when you sort your results by most recent date, you should see the most recent date first. Remember you can save your search if you go into the “Advanced Search” area. We also heard that “Date” and “Date Added” were confusing labels- you’ll notice we are now calling “Date” “Event Date” to help clear things up.

• Last thing, there was an issue with the Stats page for Internet Explorer users when we released plug-ins a couple of weeks ago for – we fixed that…sorry about that!

Enjoy and keep the feedback coming!

We got a ton of great feedback over the past week after launching Last.fm, Twitter and Google plugins and the new Find Gigs section.

And we’ve been doing more than just reading your feedback. We’ve been working on making tweaks to both the Plugins and the Find Gigs section based on what you’ve said. Here’s what we released today:
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Ever wonder what people are saying about your band or who’s listening to your music (um, of course you do!)?  Promoters do too, and will often search for bands online to check out their buzz.  Well, we just made it a little easier for artists and promoters to track buzz all in one place – on Sonicbids – by integrating Last.fm listens and GoogleBlog and Twitter search results into artist and promoter accounts.

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