[Changelog] August 18th, 2023

I've been working on a lot of big projects lately (including a holiday in July 🏖️), so these nitty-bitty changelog lists have been far and few between. This week was different though: I got to sit down and work through a lot of smaller tasks on the docket. Hopefully you find some of them useful!

Oh, and before we get too deep, a couple exciting things:

• The entire SubmitHub team will be attending SXSW in Austin, TX next year ✈️
• The average premium approval rate just hit an all-time high of 25% (for the trailing 30 days) 🎉
• This seems to be directly related to our recent changes

Influencers

• Simplified each influencer's "profile", centralizing everything on one page (this actually took up the majority of my week)
• Got rid of "topics" (eg: makeup, dance, etc) as most influencers have varied content and these rarely seemed to be accurate
• Simplified genre selection. We have 250+ genres, and most influencers don't care about it too much, so we're now just doing optional genre "parent" categories
• Wrote a little script that attempts to send an influencer a new song every time they log in so that there's something waiting for them

Marketplace

It's been ~3 months since the Marketplace launched, and there've been 3,460 requests so far (1,344 in the last 30 days). The majority of these requests (98%) have been for album and EP reviews.

Some recent tweaks:

• I wrote a script to identify projects that have been spinning for a long time without an update
• Accidentally flagged some projects that were waiting for release date, so unraveled that mess
• Specialists with 5+ open projects now get their submissions "paused" so avoid further buildup
• A few other minor changes, such as consistent $/credit denomination

Miscellaneous

• Chatrooms should now keep track of whether there've been messages since your last visit
• Scrolling to the last-read message is a bit harder 🥴
• The popular chart now shows how many monthly listeners each artist has
• The number that displays is a cached number, so it might not be exact in all cases. Every time someone loads it, the script runs an update in the background, which means that if you refresh in ~20 seconds it should show the latest number 🥳
• Downloading files now saves the filename as the song title, rather than whatever filename the uploader originally used
• This change applies both to MP3/WAV downloads (for those with copyright permission) and album artwork
• The popup for daily stats of SubmitHub Links got a shiny new chart
• Fixed a bug where a blocked user could still submit if going directly via a curator's profile
• Integrated a new "how to increase your engagement score" article that Jami wrote
• A few tweaks to the quality and engagement scores to make things more linear and less 1/0
• For example, quality score gets impacted if more than 20 songs are unshared. Previously, hitting 20 meant you lost a point, whereas being at 19 meant you were fine. With this new approach, you start losing fractions of a point for every song above 20, rather than going full-throttle all at once
• Made a similar change for # of genres selected and # of tracks in a Spotify playlist (engagement score)

Oh, and before we sign off, here's a positive review that Two Story Melody published this week about their recent SubmitHub campaign.