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.

As most of you know Sonicbids has been handling the voting for Lollapalooza’s Last Band Standing competition. The voting application is built off of our core technologies and I have been excited watching the voting take place. Check out the microsite to see how it works.

John

I spent the better part of my Saturday waiting at the garage while my car was undergoing regular maintenance. I feel it’s important to do the regular oil changes, tire rotations, and other standard maintenance; I want it to be ready when I need to use it.

Just as I count on my car to be ready when I need it, our members count on Sonicbids to be ready when they need it. That’s why you see us spending time each week fixing bugs, working to improve site performance, and adding new features. These regular updates are critical so that we can keep things running as well today, with our 150,000+ artist and 14,000+ promoters, as it did when Panos started the site years ago. Of course, unlike the tire rotation which takes place while the car is up on the lift, our changes take place while our members are working with the site, almost like performing that same tire rotation while you’re driving the car a top speed. It is great being an engineer.

In the last couple of months we have made nearly one hundred updates to the site, ranging from fixing bugs to adding new features. Please continue letting us know where we need to improve, we need your input as we continue to improve your site.

John

Here in Artist Relations we want to make it as easy as possible for you to get your questions answered and issues resolved so you can get back to the fun part of your job, making music.

Early this morning we launched our new Sonicbids Support Center at http://www.sonicbids.com/support. Here are a few of the improvements you’ll see:

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Our FAQs are now searchable via the search box and organized by question type in the “Information Center” section of the Support Center. You can also rate our FAQ answers to let us know if they are helpful or not.

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The new “Troubleshooter” tool will try and find you an answer the fastest way possible.

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Our new “Expert Support” ticketing system will make sure your question gets to the right person.

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We’ll be continualy tweaking the system over the next few weeks to get things just right, but if you’ve got a question about Sonicbids, it just got even easier to get an answer.

Rock on,

Lou
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Artist Relations Manager
Sonicbids.com

The builders have been keeping a close eye on the video conversion updates we recently made. Videos are converting significantly faster with the updated system.

This week I will give you some updates on our upcoming release plans. Feel free to drop me a note if there is anything else you would like to hear about.

-John
CTO

The Sonicbids’ video conversion process was created years ago and the builders have been spending time working on improving performance. We made some changes yesterday and we will be spending this weekend monitoring conversion performance. I will post updates over the course of the weekend.

John
CTO

Hi,

I wanted to set the Builders Blog up and use it as a better way of sharing what the engineers, or builders, at Sonicbids are working on. While this entry is an overview of the purpose of the blog, future entries will contain a lot more details regarding what we’re working on, when it’s coming, and any of the challenges we have in front of us. I may occasionally use the space to discuss technology, but I’ll limit that as the purpose of this blog is to keep all of you abreast of what’s going on at Sonicbids and how we’re working to make this service better, day by day.

When I joined Sonicbids in early summer, 2007, we had a small team of hard working and very dedicated builders. We’ve grown a lot over the last year and are aligning ourselves to more quickly address issues that come up as well as to deliver more solutions for all of you. We now have many more developers fixing bugs and coding features, quality engineers who test the code to help ensure the quality keeps getting better, and project managers and product managers who are working hard to help the builders know what is important to build and to build it on a schedule that makes sense for all of you. I know we’re far from perfect, but I can promise that we’re going to keep working hard and continue working to get better.

Okay, so what are the builders at Sonicbids working on now? We all believe that it is important to continue to put more accountability and transparency into the communications that take place between the artists and promoters on our site. While we clearly are the place to find gigs on the web, and we clearly have a fantastic user community, that is not enough. A community must be built on open communications and we know we can do more to help facilitate the communications and to provide transparency into the process. To this end, here are some of the big items we’re working on:

- Transparency. We want to do more and focus on giving artists a clear picture of what is happening every step of the way. Has the promoter reviewed my EPK? Did they play my video? The information is not visible enough today, but by the end of June there will be a lot more information available to everyone. This will be a first step, and I’ll talk in greater detail about this in upcoming posts.

- Accountability. If you’re paying money to have someone review your EPK, you want someone to review your EPK. The vast majority of the time this happens and the process works. However, we want to more clearly communicate what each promoter will do, and make sure that artist and promoters have the same expectations for the value of Sonicbids. What’s more important is we’ll make sure that money is tied to these expectations so that both artists and promoters can feel great about the transactions taking place on the site. Some of this work will take place in June and I will, as with the topic above, discuss it in greater detail in coming posts.

- Providing ever higher levels of support. Our process for how our customers interact with customer support is getting even better and you’ll be seeing even better systems being available in the first week of June. We will be releasing a much improved support system that works to get the right questions in front of the right people quicker, with our goal being for you to get the answer faster. I’m not going to pretend that this will revolutionize Sonicbids support overnight, it won’t. It will, however, be another step in making improvements in how we communicate, how we continue to be more transparent ourselves, and how we get issues addressed much faster.

- Fixing our mistakes. Hey, we are not happy when anyone finds a problem with the site. That means the builders didn’t get it right the first time (or sometimes the second or third time) and we want to eliminate things that are slowing you up.

Alright, I’m now shifting my focus back to working on the product.

John
CTO