• 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.

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

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 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.

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.

• 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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