[Changelog] Mar 5th, 2021

For the month of March we're trying think a bit more about business development and marketing. But that doesn't mean I haven't been able to sneak in a bit of code :)

Podcasts

Two new podcasts featuring yours truly!

• HowNow delves into the history of music blogging and how it led to SubmitHub: https://hownowpod.com/
• Bandhive and I get into the nitty-gritty of payola and influencer marketing: https://pod.co/bandhive/

Hot or Not

I completely revamped the charts to be based on a multi-point rating system and not just upvote vs. downvote. Here's the formula:

• Calculations done using an average-rating based on Wilson Score that factors a song's mix of bad, average, good, and amazing ratings
• A song needs at least 5 ratings within given time frame to be included
• Ratings given after listening for less than 30 seconds are not included
• Only songs where users have specifically requested Hot or Not votes are included in the charts (sometimes song spill over from the normal curator-based chart without explicitly requesting votes)

You can find the end result here.

SubmitHub Links

• You can now set up a "redirect" link that instantly goes to the URL you specify (while still tracking data for Facebook's pixel)
• There's also geographic information under the analytics section of each Link
• Dylan published a series of excellent Facebook articles: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Web Scraping

This has actually taken up most of my week. Not very glamorous. Instagram and TikTok have been putting more work into "anti-spam" measures for their website, which has made it a lot harder for me to scrape influencer data. I've got a half-baked solution that works ~50% of the time now, so as long as I keep those scripts running 2x then it seems like I'm fine. Boring snoring.

My current approach is to use scraperapi.com (paying them $99/month) to use their proxy service to make requests. This helps get around spam/blocking rules. But it's not ideal :(