Blog

What's Been Happening?

When we started Limited Run back in 2009, we had one goal in mind: Create a place for our friends to sell some records. We never dreamed that we'd be powering stores for the biggest artists and labels in the world. But now we are, and in 2016 alone, we handled close to $20 million in sales through stores.

What about stability? Well, over the last 4 years we've had zero downtime. This means that our software has never once, not even for a second, had an issue that took down the platform. Not during some relaxing morning, or when our stores were selling out in seconds. You'll be hard pressed to find any platform that can even sniff that uptime.

But how much investment have we taken? And how many employees did we need to achieve this? We're extremely proud to say that we've never taken investment, and we're still only 2 people. You might see that we rarely tweet, email you or write blog posts. Now you know why. We don't have the time! But that needs to change, and hopefully in the future we can add a third or even fourth person to the team.

So What's Next?

For the last year or so, we've been working hard on a new direction for Limited Run. This new direction will be launching soon, and part of it will be new pricing. It was very hard for us to come to terms with the fact that we needed to make this change. We've had a monthly fee for all 7 years of our existence. But without risk, there can be no growth. The new pricing plan will be 5% of sales. No monthly fee, no product limit, no digital fees, no storage fees, no feature restrictions. Just a straight 5% of sales. Anyone on the platform before that, can choose to stay on LR v2, at their current price and plan. If you decide to make the switch sooner, rather than later, we're going to have some promotional discounts that you'll be able to take advantage of.

While we'd love you to switch to v3 out of the goodness of your heart, we realize it's going to take features. So our job over the next couple of months is to convince you that the features are worth the change. We believe they're worth that, and more. And we're betting our lives on it. Stay tuned.

Some of our older customers might remember us launching a side project called Card Included, back in 2012. Some of our newer customers might be thinking, "What in the world is this?!". We can explain. Card Included is a self-serve download card service. It began as an easy way for labels and bands to include a download card with vinyl, but it's grown into something a lot bigger. Now, some people are using it as a way to promote their music in person. They hand them out at shows, or keep them in their pockets like business cards. Others are giving out private download URLs online. We even get the occasional author, looking to promote their book.

Card Included has been chugging along happily for the last couple of years, without a single update. And until recently, we never felt like it needed to be changed. It was basically perfect. Now it's not basically perfect, it is perfect. Here's what we've done:

Embeddable Redemption Widget

It's been a long time coming, but we finally did it. We now have an embeddable redemption widget for your own site. So if you know HTML, and can add the widget code to your website, there's an option in Step 2 of the designer, that says "I plan on using the embeddable widget". If you check that, we'll provide you with the necessary code, after your purchase. This also means that we'll be using your own URL on the cards we send you! Pretty awesome, we know. You'll also get an easy way to customize the widget's colors. You'll only need to do this once. For future orders, just check that box, and if you're using the same URL, you won't need the widget code again.

Digital Street Date

This new feature, works just like on Limited Run. You can specify a date you'd like us to prevent downloading until. It's an important feature for people sending records to stores, distros or out on tour with a band on your label.

Fan Location Downloads

Any time a fan uses a code to download a release, we automatically get their approximate location. With this new feature, we allow you to download a list of these locations. This list is a great way to help you plan future tours.

Artwork Support in Overlays

A while back we came up with a super slick way of letting people use any website as their download page, without needing to know or use HTML. Basically, you give us a URL, and we load that website, behind an overlay. In that overlay, it has your release's info, and a way to download it. Now, we stepped up our visual game, and let you add artwork to that overlay. To get the artwork just right, we added a spot to upload it in Step 1 of the designer.

Mobile Download Override

There's so much confusion about how mobile downloading works. The easiest way to explain it is, it doesn't. The experience is terrible on mobile. This is why we block downloads when a fan goes to the link on a mobile device. A lot of people don't realize how bad mobile is for downloading, especially on iOS. They contact us, wondering why their fans are prevented from accessing the files. They believe we're the reason it doesn't work, which isn't true. But, at the end of the day, we don't want to leave anyone hanging, so we decided to make this possible with a secret feature. If the user believes they can download and unzip the album, on their mobile device, all you need to do is tell them to add "?m" to the end of their download URL. This will unlock the download, and let them proceed. But we need to stress this, it's a bad idea.

If you have any questions, please get in touch. Thanks everyone.

We have a bunch of things left to tell you about for our final post of the week. Let's do this in list form:

Daily SoundScan Reports

Yes, we do SoundScan reporting! I know it's not on our homepage, but we do it! We do a lot of things that aren't on our homepage. Sometimes we even think the homepage has too much info on it. But that's a discussion for another day. So on the reporting change, SoundScan recently switched from weekly reporting, to daily reporting, and we've updated our system to reflect that. If you didn't know that we already did SoundScan reporting, check out this help doc.

Support For New TLDs

If you want to use one of those wacky new TLDs like .coffee and .design, in your custom domain, then you'll be happy to know that we now support all of these.

Uploading Your Own Fonts

No surprise here. We now let you upload your own fonts, while editing files in your custom theme. The way we handled this in the past was just embarrassing, so we're glad this is taken care of now.

Reversed Search Results

This one seemed so obvious when a customer pointed it out, but it was the first time anyone has ever said anything. We used to return products oldest first when searching a store. That made no sense. We should have been returning the newest products first! Search for a band, and you want to see their newest preorder, right at the top. Duh.

We're known for our extremely fast and streamlined checkout, but it's been a challenge to get all our features to work, in such a small area, over the years. This is one of the reasons why we always had a horizontal cart. It gave us more room to fit features like Checkout Note and Discount Codes. But after we decided to add the Gift Card feature, we realized that the old cart needed to be reimagined. But we also knew that our checkout had serious brand recognition. No one does a cart like us. No one is as fast as us. No one is as no nonsense as us. Your customers know it when they see it, and they respect you more for choosing Limited Run, because it says you're concerned about their time and money. It's become almost like a status symbol, in the direct to fan world. And we really appreciate that.

So with that in mind, we came up with a new vertical cart, that not only fits all the features you could possibly install in your store, but also kept that classic LR style in place.

Here, our friends at Topshelf are using Discount Codes, Checkout Note, and our new Gift Card feature.

At Run For Cover, they don't use the Checkout Note. Probably because Tay was getting too many marriage proposals.

And In The Clouds doesn't use anything but Discount Codes. Why? We have no idea. But they better get on Gift Cards asap!

So there you have it. The new vertical cart, same as the old cart, just cooler.

If you have any questions, please let us know!

We recently added a really helpful export to our sales section. This one summarizes the sales you've received, by variation. For example, if you're a label, and you need to pay royalties on a variation level, you can now easily see how many of each variation you've sold. Plus, you'll know how much revenue you've received from the sale of each variation.

To enable this new export, go to the Sales area of your Dashboard, click the arrow attached to the Export CSV button, and then click Export Preferences.