Something else I want to add, but idk if it warrants a new topic outright, is w/r/t artist onboarding and convincing artists and labels to join Resonate.
Something we do with Topshelf when we announce a new album on our website, is offer the ability for fans to sign up to be alerted the moment the album goes up for sale so fans don’t miss out. For example, we have an album for an artist (Weatherday) announced currently, but not available for sale yet (see here). When fans land on this page to learn more about the album, they are passively prompted to sign up if they’d like to be alerted when it goes on sale.
This is then reflected in our product inventory dashboard:
Which shows us that we have 1,653 people who have expressed they want to be notified when the album becomes available. In the last column, you can also see we have an inventory of 1,500 initially allocated here—so this will be in high demand when it becomes available, which is awesome! But my main point is: We have something that is unavailable. We provide a means to signal intent. and through that, we get input that informs a future decision (i.e. I will now order 2,000 records to start instead of 1,500).
I think this process of signaling leading to action can be repeated to great effect potentially on Resonate.
Currently, a very, very, very small fraction of existing artists have their work on Resonate. Which, that’s fine! But the goal is to get more to join. A search for “Weatherday” on Resonate yields a big blank page with the text “No results found”.
This, for a listener, is obviously a bummer, but more importantly, it’s an opportunity!! What if instead of a big blank page, it was utilized as a space to incentivize listeners to express interest in that artist to join resonate. Users can signal they want the artist to join, and maybe there are some calls to action with pre-filled things people can tweet at an artist.
I think API data from third parties like lastfm, Gracenote, or even Spotify APIs can be utilized to dynamically build out pages for artists despite them not having accounts on resonate yet. Consider them as placeholders. There could even be a prompt that says “are you Weatherday? 1,653 listeners want to hear your music on our platform! Sign up to start getting paid fairly to share your music with our community today” or something like that.
I don’t think you do this for like, The Beatles—or larger artists on majors—but you can target artists with a specific amount of listeners / scrobbles / followers / etc.—some criteria that clearly targets the independent artist community primarily.
To go further, to encourage this sort of stalwart behavior from listeners, their might be some sort of reward component if an artist they have signaled to come join the platform does in fact sign up, they are rewarded with credits or something related to that artist’s community on Resonate. In turn, the artist, upon signing up (let’s say Weatherday and their 1,653 listeners who have signaled they want them to join in this scenario), they would immediately have those listeners as followers to engage with and share updates directly to.
This could serve as a vehicle to signal to artists “a community is awaiting you here on Resonate” which I think could be a powerful motivator if the mechanics of this can be worked out. Of course, if an artist has an underwhelming amount of people signaling, maybe hide that number until it reaches some sort of threshold like >50 or something.