Recent updates

[Changelog] March 10th, 2023

Welcome to this week's product update! Here are some of the main things I've been coding:

Quality score

Perhaps the most notable update this week is that the "Quality Score" has moved from a range of 5-10 to a broader scale of 1-10

  • This metric is a reflection of each curator's behavior *on* SubmitHub, and shouldn't be confused with the separate Genre and Engagement scores
  • For a full breakdown of changes as well as the factors considered you can read this article

Spotify Restore

If you're a playlister, you no doubt know about Spotify's terrible playlist "reporting" problem. Good news is I think I've got a solution for you 💜

  • Last month I started keeping track of each playlist's meta data (name, description, artwork)
  • As of today, you can enable "auto restore" for your playlists, which means that every 10 minutes we'll check to see if your playlist is still online, and if not, we'll restore it for you
  • This feature can be accessed from the "options" to the right of each of your playlists

SubmitHub Links

If you've ever done Facebook or Meta advertising, you're probably familiar with landing pages. A lot of our playlisters use them to keep their playlists engaged, so last year we rolled out our own in-house version.

As of this week, SubmitHub Links can now use *any* link as part of your landing page.

  • This includes Spotify songs, albums, and profiles, as well as ... well, anything!
  • Here's an example using Bandcamp

If you're familiar with landing pages, chances are you've used a service like Hypeddit or Toneden before. Here's why we're better:

  • These services typically load 10mb+ of tracking scripts and data when a user visits, which makes them slow and bloated
  • SubmitHub Links are only 5.2kb in size (2,000 times smaller 😮)
  • Additionally, our setup respects the privacy of the user who happens to be clicking them
  • I don't load any of Facebook's bloated tracking software; there are no cookies; and I don't collect any personal data

To learn more, check out this page.

Marketplace

As a reminder, the SubmitHub Marketplace is going to be a lot like Fiverr, but with better quality control and made specifically for the music industry. We're aiming to get this one live toward the end of the month.

For now, applications are in a "closed beta" that's only available to curators. In the next week or two we'll likely broaden this to let anyone apply to fulfill a service.

  • This week we wrapped up a number of changes on the back-end that will make it easier for us to review applications
  • I've also started the process of requesting a service. Here's how we see it working:
  • User makes a request
  • User provides the necessary assets / answers any questions
  • The service provider then reviews their request, and makes an "offer" to complete that request
  • If the user is happy with that offer, the process kicks off!

Miscellaneous

  • Tilly has been going strong with the whole "launching the Marketing department" thing
  • In case you missed it, check out our Instagram
  • The Hot or Not dashboard now includes average listen time for your song
  • With the digest emails that launched 2 weeks ago, recent shares now include direct links
  • On the subject of digest emails, some folks wanted the individual decline emails back, so I've added an option for that while submitting
  • I've made some tweaks to SubmitHub Teams so that the team manager not only sees all the activity of those in their purview, but can also edit all of that
  • When approving a free submission as a shout-out curators are no longer required to provide an explanation for why it's not worth a proper share
  • When browsing the list of curators, clicking their name will open a popup to favorite them and/or add a note
  • Formerly, this opened up their full profile, including a link to "submit directly"
  • My thinking here is that when browsing the curators list, we're already showing you 95%+ of the relevant information for that curator, so pushing everyone toward direct submissions was a bit confusing. Ideally I want folks to submit in bulk, not with 10 individual separate submissions
  • Here's what that popup looks like
  • If you hold Shift + click it will open their full profile; If you hold Cntrl/Cmd + click, it will open their profile in a new tab
  • Last but not least, two changes to Stories:
  • Comment count is now visible
  • Views count also visible in bottom right of each story (you should see it right below of this text)