[Changelog] April 28, 2023

Howdy, and welcome to this week's update. I've been a bit pressed for time as it was a short week, but some good stuff still got done.

If you've got any requests or ideas, feel free to share them in the comments!

Similar artists

We launched this feature last week, and so far the feedback has been quite positive. This week I made two updates:

• We're now including 2.6 million historical SubmitHub approvals in the mix. This means we can create artist preference profiles for those who don't actively maintain their own playlists
• Fun fact: there have been ~4 million approvals so far, and the script that attempts to associate them with Spotify artists (for purposes of searching) took roughly a week to run. I probably could have done it faster, but wanted to avoid overloading the database
• You can now edit your similar artists from the song detail page

Marketplace

I'm struggling to get through this as fast as I was hoping, but I'm making progress! My goal was to finish end-of-April, but I got distracted by the Similar Artists stuff. So... next week I hope to wrap things up and launch beta? Fingers crossed!

In the meanwhile, here's what's new (you can poke around here to see some of it in action):

• You can now sort the options of each category
• I've gotten the mobile menu/navigation all set up (this isn't public yet)

I've continued work on the flow for setting up a Marketplace project:

• User browses options
• User selects options
• User provides required details
• Specialist responds with a quote
• User reviews quote and approves/declines (in progress)
• Credits are locked up as a guarantee for specialist
• Assuming approval, both parties can go back and forth
• Specialist finishes project and shares deliverables
• User signs off on deliverables or requests admin review
• Credits released to specialist

Miscellaneous

• A bunch of backend admin stuff you don't get to know about 💜
• Improved the process of upgrading a shout-out to a proper share for @The Slow Music Movment
• You can now copy-paste images into the HTML editor (eg, when updating your artist bio)
• Influencer Reels + TikTok minimum length is now 7 seconds instead of 10 seconds based on feedback from influencers, who argue that shorter videos often get more engagement
• Upgrade the influencer application flow and landing page
• If you've created an invoice before, you'll have seen it asks for your business/invoice details. These can now be edited from your account page
• I've cached the results of the Hot or Not chart to speed up queries, and optimized the general Popular chart to make those queries faster as well. These sections of the site were both giving the database a hard time

Okay, that's about it for this week. It's a 5-day weekend in South Africa, so I've been a bit pressed for time. Hoping next week is a train smash on the Marketplace!

Oh, and be sure to follow us on Instagram where @Tilly is doing a rock-solid job as our Head of Marketing :)

- Jason