A new "Follow" button for artists

I've been planning to introduce this feature for some time, and I'm glad it's now ready. The idea is fairly simple, but I wanted to share a breakdown of what's going on behind the scenes.

My expectation is that this feature will be particularly handy for those of you using Hot or Not to review songs. I'm sure many curators will enjoy it, as well 🙂

The button

• On each artist profile, you'll now find a "+FOLLOW" button right below the name.
• Clicking this button looks a bit like this:
• There's also a handy counter that shows how many followers you have, and it breaks them down by role. If one of them happens to be a curator, it'll include a link to their profile
• NB: The followers number is only visible to the artist and otherwise not public
• For those of you using Hot or Not, you'll see the button in the artist box at the bottom

If you want to opt out of this feature, simply set your artist profile to "Private" 🔒

Behind the scenes

Two things happen when someone follows a profile:

1. The artist gets notified that they've got a new follower (hooray!)
2. I keep track of things in a database that allows me to send a notification to every follower when an artist (or their team) uploads a new song to the profile. If that song happens to be unreleased, my code will wait until release date to actually send out the notification

Each notification email comes with a handy unsubscribe link, and I've also added a setting to your user profile that lets you opt out of these emails.

You can see a complete breakdown of all the artists you follow from this same user profile under the "Following" tab.

When you receive a notification email it will link you directly to that artist's new song, with a handy 💜 icon that you can click to add the song to your favorites.

If you're a curator, opening the song will also reveal a useful "Approve" button, just like you already see on the popular charts and artist profiles. This, of course, assumes they haven't already sent the song to you (in which case you'll see a note to that effect).

Hope you find the feature useful!