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We wanted to write something about a direct-to-fan service we’re going to be working with a lot in the future. That service is called PledgeMusic. If you haven’t heard of it before, here’s an overview.

PledgeMusic helps artists and bands design a specifically tailored fundraising campaign to raise money for their next release. Whether you’re looking to record and distribute your next album, or you’ve already recorded it and you just want to gauge your fans receptiveness to unique formats like vinyl, PledgeMusic makes it extremely easy.

Using PledgeMusic also gives you a way to set up different tier levels, so that each fan has a way to contribute as little, or as much as they like. For instance, take a look at Ginger Wildheart’s newest Project. Here he’s not just doing an album for one of his bands, but two albums for his band Mutation, and another one for his band Hey! Hello!. But fans of each band can contribute separately. So if you like pop, you’ll be able to contribute to the Project, and only receive music for Hey! Hello!. But if you’re into “guitar riffs”, which Ginger discusses a lot in his very funny preview video, then you can contribute and receive just the two albums from Mutation.

What’s really interesting about this approach is by piggy backing these two bands together, Ginger is getting each band cross pollinated by the other. Marketing costs are lower with this method as well. We have never seen someone do this before, but Ginger is an expert. His Triple Album Project debuted at #27 on the UK Top 40, and ranked as high as #9, when he used PledgeMusic. So it’s no wonder he’s trying and experimenting with new angles on the platform.

PledgeMusic does a few things differently than other platforms out there. And these features definitely made the choice easy when we decided we wanted to work with a direct-to-fan fundraising platform. Obviously them being only about music was important. Even though anyone can use our service to sell their digital and physical products, we’ve always developed with selling music in mind. But there’s something else they do that made us do a double take. Normally on other fundraising platforms, when the Project is over, meaning the date of the end of the Project is reached, fans can no longer contribute. This makes for major headaches for the Project Creator, because if they don’t also have a place to let fans preorder the album outside of funraising, then they’re essentially stuck selling nothing until their album is officially released. This idea of switching the fan flow to your store during the preorder process completely fragments the sale of your record. Just like when labels and bands use our service for their preorders, we always like to see them using one store the entire time. PledgeMusic has this same idea in mind, because even when your date is reached, and your Project goal is met, fans can still contribute and preorder the album. The date is just the Project’s state change signifier. It lets the fans know the project has moved onto to the next step, not that the Project is over. Only when the Project is in the Released state, does preordering stop. This is exactly how a typical preorder works. And it’s also the perfect spot to switch sales to your online store.

Over the next month or so we’re going to be working very closely with PledgeMusic to make your transition from the Released state of your album on PledgeMusic, to what most people would call, the Available state in your online store easier. We’ve got a couple of very cool ideas in mind, so we’ll keep everyone informed as they develop.

We’ve just released a revamped page creator. In addition to being really sleek, it’s now even easier to create pages both with, and without, knowing HTML.

When working on a regular page, if you often find yourself embedding video from YouTube or Vimeo, you’ll be happy to hear that now there’s a dedicated button for doing just that. No more digging into the page’s HTML just to drop in those clips. But embedding video isn’t the only thing that’s new, now you’ll find a host of great shortcuts to make formatting and editing your page’s content a breeze. And if you really need to get down to work, there’s also a new option for full screening.

For all the developers out there, custom HTML page creation has also been updated. Now it’s using the same powerful editor that’s in the Themes area. No more switching back and forth to a rich text editor, when all you want to do is write HTML.

Lastly, if you’re using the News Module, don’t worry we haven’t forgotten about you. We’ve added the same great rich text editor to the News area as well.

We’d like to let everyone know how much we’ve appreciated their support. It’s meant a lot to us. When we posted about leaving Facebook on Monday, we only intended our small group of customers and followers to know what was happening, and why. We had no clue it was going to explode like it did. But now, we’re just a very small company, that wants nothing more than to go back to work. We don’t want to be known for this, and we’re going to keep turning down requests for interviews. Facebook is in contact with us, and they’re going to look into the issues we had. This is all we can say. Once again, thank you so much for your kind words, and the courage it took for you to speak your minds. We’ve barely slept in the past few days, but your comments, tweets, and emails, have really helped us push through all this shit. We apologize that we can’t reply to you all, so please accept this small token of thanks from our youth:

Update, April 2nd, 2013: To see our new credit card checkout process, see our new post.

Often when a fan buys an album with another service, they’re funneled into a long checkout process with multiple pages, that usually ends with them completing their purchase at PayPal. Not only this, but when a fan wants to redeem a digital album, they need to fumble around with emails and links. You may have noticed that we’re doing things a little differently. We show an overlay and try to give the fan the feeling that they’re not leaving the store. We believe this is a better experience. So in light of this incredibly obvious and simplistic idea, we’ve decided to take the speed and convenience of our checkout even further!

We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve changed the entire cart process, so fans never have to leave the last page they were on. From checking out, to paying, to downloading the album. This means no more waiting for emails, cursing spam filters, or clicking links. A problem that plagues 3rd party services other platforms use. This new approach keeps fans interacting with your store, as well as provides a cleaner and more streamlined experience.

Helping fans avoid waiting for email, was only one reason to make this change. The other reason was SoundCloud. We knew that if we kept fans at the store, they could stream music with SoundCloud the entire time. And if you combine streaming, with SoundCloud’s great social features like commenting and liking, our checkout is not only the fastest checkout on the planet, but the most fun!

Watch the short video at the top to see it in action.

If you haven’t heard yet, not only are we not in beta anymore, but we’ve added even more incredible features! Let’s talk about a few of them:

Digital Street Date

A feature that we’re extremely happy to bring everyone is what we’re calling “Digital Street Date”. This lets you preorder an album, but delay the download of that album until a date you specify. And to make it even easier for you, on the date you specify, we’ll email your customers to let them know it’s available!

Live Inventory Tracking

Huh?! That’s right! When you’re in the products section of your dashboard, the Sold, Held, and Remaining columns now automatically update themselves. It shows you exactly when your customers are at PayPal and when they’ve completed their payment. It’s an incredible feature for newly released, fast selling products.

Themes

We’ve enlisted Nick Moreton, a talented UK resident and all around great guy, to help fill out our theme gallery over the next few months. We’re very happy to have him helping out on that front and you can already check out three of his new themes in the gallery, so go have a look!

Daily Sales Reports

With our new daily sales reports section, you can quickly skim through your sales totals on a day-by-day basis. We even have a graph so you can jump back through your store’s history, a couple of weeks at a time.

Customer Management

See, search, and sort through everyone that’s ever checked out from your store. At a glance you can see exactly how many orders each person placed, how much they’ve spent, when they first ordered, and when they last ordered. When you’re ready to announce something new, just click export and get a list of your customers ready for MailChimp or FanBridge. You can even see customers that downloaded a free album you gave away.

One Click Order Export and Packing

Now with one click in your sales area, you can export all the orders you have waiting to be shipped to CSV or print packing slips and shipping labels.

Customer Notes During Checkout

You can now let your customers attach a note to their order prior to checking out, right from the cart. Customer notes will be added to your packing checklist too, making it extremely easy to keep track of all the ins and outs of a specific order.

There are a million more little things we’ve released this week, so check your store’s dashboard for a full update. And as always, if you have any questions just send us a message.