Roadrunner Blogs | Official signmeto Roadrunner Records Blog

....but maybe we made it just a tiny bit easier.

Well, at least we have made the submission of music a helluva lot easier.

Yes, we recently launched our new A&R (Artists & Repertoire) website - signmeto.roadrunnerrecords.com. It's not the usual closed shop, however. Signmeto goes beyond a simple demo submission form and allows bands to give it their best shot with 3 tunes, 3 pics, some bio info, an embedded YouTube vid and even some tour dates.

If your not a musician, or not in a band right now, but fancy your ability to judge quality from crap...join signmeto as a scout. It is open to anyone with a simple sign up process. In fact, current RR website members have a simple process of opting in once they are at the signmeto website and you are off and runnign as a scout.

The idea is that with the help of the fans we hope that the best unsigned music will shine through. The homepage features charts that highlight the current top artists and tracks based on scout reviews.....as well as a list of the latest artists, and even the top scouts. We may end up signing bands from the website AND hiring some new A&R people in the process!

This blog will be updated weekly to give you all an idea of the tweaks, features, bugs and developments we are working on to make signmeto work better. Right now there is still a mass of items we are working through to improve even the fundamentals. To give you all an idea of our main concerns:

 - "vanity" URLs - right now, when a band joins, they get assigned a ridiculously long URL that makes promoting your signmeto page a bit of a drag. We are working with our programmers to change this and give bands that sign up (as well as scouts) the URL format: signmeto.roadrunnerrecords.com/[bandname]

- The "From" field is not working properly in a band's profile. We know where bands are from, and if you search for a band by country you will get a list of every band from, say, 'Australia', but for some reason the place that a band is from is not appearing in the designated field on their profiles. We have a bunch of programming sleuths looking into this.

- better internal messaging. We have noticed that tons of bands and scouts are posting messages to each other via the comments section. Whilst this is okay, it is public, and it could be done a lot better. The private messagign system currently in existence works too much like a bad email program so we are working on simplifying it and making it work the way it should.

- the ratings system is not that easy to understand. Basically it involves clicking the little "+" and "-" signs under the tracks to open up the accordian that reveals the ratings. You roll your mouse over the skull scores you want to offer a band's song, and click. Kind of like YouTube's system. But it isn't that intuitive. We have a completely new design for the artist pages that we think looks totally badassed and will fix up a lot of these concerns.

There are just a few things that are keeping us busy. many of you have filled in the survey that is linked to at the top of the signmeto website and this has helped us enormously with feedback and suggestions. In next week's blog I will reveal some more things we are working on improving, as well as a bunch of road map items that will form part of signmeto's "Phase II" development.

Feel free to offer thoughts and comments below that I will try and respond to in this blog as well.

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