The World Around Records Website Drops Today

Posted by Justin Boland on Oct 12, 2009 | 15 comments

I have awesome news: we’ve finally launched the World Around Records website. This is a quick rundown of the features and goals, plus three questions I’ve got about the site. Your answers are hugely and greatly appreciated.

The site’s main goal is converting traffic to downloads. Considering most albums in the catalog are free downloads, that should be a reasonable enough goal. Any conversation about how World Around is going to make money is beside the point with the metrics we’ve got now—the priority for 2009 is getting more listeners, hundreds of thousands more listeners.

Right now, we’re also featuring our newest release, We Have the Technology, a full-length album from the Madison, Wisconsin live hip hop band known as dumate.

Each album page has a media player built into the tracklist. Just click on the title of any given song and the site will play the rest of the album while for you. We’ve already gotten some feedback that this wasn’t clear enough, so we’ll be tweaking the player to be more obviously functional to users. The core metrics we’re looking for are very simple at this phase: we want to be increasing listeners every month.

With that in mind, we’ve built the entire site to aim users towards the music. That’s the purpose behind the album slider menu, which is embedded onto everything on the site (except our very cool search page).

My Questions

1. Is everything obvious? We’re not trying to make an interactive puzzle game, we want people to play the music, dig what they hear, and then download that music, too. Do the album pages make intuitive sense to y’all?

2. How is the sound? For streaming, we’re trying to balance speed and quality—I’d like to know if it sounds good enough to be listenable while you’re working.

…and finally…

3. What features do you expect to see, but don’t?

15 Comments

1 Aleph Acrylicist says...

Lyrics view/search. I know that's a crap-ton of work though--but it seems worth it if you're wanting to get people into the music with lots and lots of metadata.

Posted at 9:18 a.m. on October 13, 2009
2 mike device says...

1 - everything here makes sense to me, but you might want to make a note on top of the the streaming title (like "click to stream") because that might not be immediately apparent.

2 - I thought the sound was fine quality for streaming. It loads quick for me too, which to me, is as big of deal as quality. There's nothing worse than the music cutting out for buffering.

3 - It would be cool to have a pop-out player, so you can browse the site while continuing to stream music.

Posted at 10:27 a.m. on October 13, 2009
3 refe says...

I would suggest putting some sort of title over the streaming tracks. 'Listen' or 'Tracks' or 'Free Streaming' or something like that. They aren't an obvious link color and there isn't really anything that tells you to click them. The big play buttons help, but they might be necessary if you just gave the section a title or header.

By the way, Dumate = awesome. They're from Wisconsin?

Posted at 4:26 p.m. on October 13, 2009
4 Bling Finger says...

YO Mike!

Thanks for the feedback, we've added "play" buttons to each of the tracks for now. Seems a bit repetitive and clunky but I think it addresses the issue of whether you can play them or not. We're looking into a better solution.

A pop up player is something else we're looking into. I have some ideas on how to do that, something that maybe added as well in the future.

@Aleph Acrylist:

Yeah man you'll have to talk to Justin about the Lyrics, maybe we could package them in the downloads?

Thanks again for all the feedback, looking forward to hearing what every has to say!

Posted at 5:19 p.m. on October 13, 2009
5 Louis Caruthers says...

A friend of mine was browsing last night and the biggest thing was him wanting to browse the site without stopping the music. Another friend of mine had the same problem. I know it was stated above too but I thought reiterating a couple other instances of that occurrence would embolden the importance of ameliorating the player.

Posted at 6:45 p.m. on October 13, 2009
6 Chris says...
I think the site is slick as hell. Some things I would suggest:
- Extremely obvious "click tracks to stream/download". People seem to lack a great degree of intelligence on the net without written, pointed instructions.
- An incentive for signing up to the WA mailing list. Full download of newest record? A compilation of all the WA artists? A valuable lesson I learned was WIIFM ("What's In It For Me?"). Just having a mailing list won't mean people will sign up.
- Evident links (or links at all) for purchasing the records. Physical and downloads.
- A forum. Artists can't pull off forums unless they're big news. But as a label you're the hub. You're reinforcing the brand/collective, not a single artist.
Posted at 9:16 p.m. on October 13, 2009
7 Justin Boland says...

Feedback has been awesome and we're wicked grateful.

@A:A

I definitely want to incorporate lyrics-that's my personal favorite feature on Bandcamp. I've already got everything I dropped typed up so it's not much work at all.

@Louis

I won't lie, I had to go look up "Ameliorate" and I kinda fucking hate you for that. That said, you're 100% dead-on right and it's a reasonable expectation. We'll be rethinking on that one.

Chris

Awesome round of suggestions. Bing!

We've also had some cats request torrent integration and iPhone versions, so far. This process has been fun, thanks everyone for checking out the site and lending us your brains.

Posted at 12:12 a.m. on October 14, 2009
8 squidness says...

your site is pretty cool but i think it would benefit from the presence of glittery animated gifs

Posted at 2:33 p.m. on October 14, 2009
9 Julian says...
1. Yes
2. Sounds excellent.
3. As said before, lyrics, and also a description of World Around Records and maybe the artists involved would inviting information on the Home Page.
Posted at 8:47 a.m. on October 15, 2009
10 Justin Boland says...

@Everyone

The answers have been awesome, and a very refreshing lesson in the power of many brains. We worked on this a loooooooong time and we've seen a ton of fresh ideas here. This has been a good example of going beta early working out. We've already updated the media players and made several other cosmetic changes while we work out little, tiny, meaningless details like...our business plan. Lots more meta-posts on the way about our internal system at World Around, believe me.

We've got a survey we're rolling out fairly quietstyles:

http://bit.ly/3UFUH2

Just 6 questions. We're definitely looking to ask listeners, but even if you've never heard us, several of those questions would be very useful. THANK YOU.

Posted at 12:51 a.m. on October 16, 2009
11 verge says...

The website looks great to me.

Sorry I don't have any tips, but it seems pretty right to me so far.

I'm sure there will be things like people have already stated that will be improved upon in the future, but it sure looks great for a new website.

Posted at 12:20 a.m. on October 18, 2009
12 MalaKai says...

I was impressed with the site from the get-go. I think promotional efforts at bringing in third-party referrers would be a top notch idea now that everything is more-or-less established. I liked the compilation idea above. Put some already released material in a new package and send if off to the blogospheres. People will want to hear this music regardless of how flashy the website looks I think. Short attention-span 2.0 is heavily in full effect though, these days. But upon first inspection the website looks engaging.

Posted at 1:48 p.m. on October 19, 2009
13 Corey says...

It's a new site that yre testing, but soon I think you will want some explanation as to what the site is. Is it a record label? Is it a new music service? (I honestly didn't know it was at first) A single line of introduction would be enough.

Posted at 7 a.m. on October 22, 2009
14 MalaKai says...

I just had an idea, but it may already be in the works. It's too obvious to overlook but maybe this is just my brain talking...

Where's the "store" or "shop" section?

e.g., HOME/BLOG/ARTISTS/ALBUMS/ABOUT/SHOP

I don't know if this was something you already had in mind, but upon second-glance the average visitor won't know where to buy stuff unless they go to the 'albums' or 'blog' sections.

Posted at 10:17 a.m. on October 22, 2009
15 All Roots says...

Definitely would like to see "purchase" options that don't involve leaving the site.

Have you looked into the Topspin course? I saw you commented on Hypebot about considering it, what did you decide?

Posted at 11:19 p.m. on November 2, 2009