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.

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!

Starting today artist members will be able to rate and review gig listings. Here’s how it works:

· Only artists that submit to gigs are able to leave reviews on gig listings.

· Only artists that were selected are able to rate gig listings.

o Artists can assign a 1-5 star rating based on their overall experience with the gig.

o Artists will also be asked some questions about the gig which will help to identify it’s strengths and areas for improvement. (example below)

o Lastly, we’ll ask selected artists to let us know if they made any money on the gig. This part isn’t displayed publicly, but will help us get a better sense of what kinds of gigs are generating money for our artists (so we can find more of them).

All ratings and reviews are aggregated from past listings so when you look at a gig we’ve worked with before, you’ll see ratings and reviews from artists that have played it in the past. Each review includes the artist’s name, a link to their profile and EPK, the name of the gig they’re commenting on, and if they were selected for it or just submitted. Selected artists will also have the star rating they gave the listing posted with their review:

Artists can get started now by going to their “My Submissions” tab and clicking on the gig’s name to get to view it’s listing. From there click the “Rate/Review this Gig” link and follow the instructions.

As always, let us know what you think of the new review/rating system by commenting here.

Look forward to your thoughts.

Lou

Hi,

While the majority of the team is heads down on some larger changes which I can discuss next week, we just released a few minor updates to the site. This include a couple of bug fixes and minor changes to our home page. Keep checking back for more updates.

John

The builders made some updates to the web site yesterday. We’re updating the site every week or two with a combination of bug fixes and minor additions while we’re making larger changes every 3 to 6 weeks. I’ll use the Builder’s Blog as a place to give everyone a lot more visibility into our updates.

This week we made several updates, including:

- If an artist had been selected for a gig that was shut down we were still incorrectly counting it as a booked gig in several parts of the site. This is fixed.
- Our promoters were experiencing some periodic problems with the Sonicbids site appearing to lock up on them. This was impacting some of our Internet Explorer users and is now fixed.
- A lot of minor cleanup beneath the covers that is focused on overall site stability and usability.

Okay, time to get more coffee and get back to work.

-John
CTO