The last time I posted a newsletter, summer was drawing to a close and we in the UK had to come to terms with the fact that our hopes of good weather were in vain. A few months have passed and I wanted to update you all on the latest features, donation system, upcoming features and the plan to open Unified Praise up to a wider audience!
Latest features
I'm just going to pick a few of the highlights, otherwise we'll be here all day...
Picks playlist
This is a new playlist which combines our artists' favourite songs from across the platform. It serves as a good introduction for new visitors to the site. If you're an artist, you can choose your picks in your artist settings and update them at any time. You can only add songs from other artists, so you can't just pick all your own songs... sorry!
New account settings
For a while the profile management was severely lacking. I've done a complete design overhaul and added more features. I've also improved the design of the artist and song settings to match.
Song actions
When you're listening to a song, you can bring up a menu to show a list of actions:
Everyone now has the ability to create playlists (via this menu and also via your playlists page), which can be private or public. You can use them to create collections of songs to share with others or simply just keep track of them yourself.
You can "like" songs, which then gives you the chance to be specific about what you like. This gets passed on to the songwriters, so we can use this feature to encourage and build one another up!
Next, you can ask the artist(s) about their song, which sends them a message and gives them the opportunity to reply to you. Finally, you can report a song if you think it isn't appropriate for whatever reason.
Invite others
Anyone with a Unified Praise account can now invite others to join, via the new account settings area. Inviting them will send out an email telling them that you've invited them, and you can optionally send a personalised message. If you have an artist account you will be able to invite others to create an artist profile, so if there are people that you would like to invite to Unified Praise, please go ahead!
Auto-suggest themes
For artists, there's a new feature that will automatically suggest themes for your songs based on the lyrics, which will hopefully take a lot of legwork and decision making out of the song tagging process. All you need to do is ensure that your song has lyrics, go to the "Tags & Themes" page and click "auto-suggest themes":
It uses a fairly simple text-matching algorithm, nothing too fancy. So it may occasionally suggest tags that aren't quite right - let me know if you run into that.
Donations (not subscriptions)!
One of the biggest blockers to me opening Unified Praise up to the outside world has been the prospect of increasing server and maintenance costs as the platform starts to grow. I wanted to test what the costs would be of having ~30 people using the site, so I could get a sense of how it might scale. I also wanted to have a potential income stream in place in the event that things started to balloon, but I wasn't too sure exactly what that should be.
I originally considered a subscription model, i.e. pay X per month to unlock a set of extra features for your artist profile. After talking with a number of the artists in our Slack channel, the feedback was that a subscription model would potentially discourage grassroots songwriters from signing up, since they don't generate significant income from their music. I want Unified Praise to be accessible for everyone, particularly those who aren't making money from their music. Imposing a subscription for them would be self-defeating given the purpose of the site.
Instead, I've implemented a donation system. I've laid out the current costs of running Unified Praise on the donation page, and those who are getting value out of the platform and want to support its mission can donate as a one-off or on a regular basis. There's also a donation bar on the homepage that will show everyone when we hit the monthly target so we can celebrate together 😄
What happens if donations reach or go over the monthly target? If I find that this is happening reasonably consistently, I'd like to use the money to add an OpenAI subscription and introduce generative AI features to the site, such as an artwork creation tool and advanced theme detection.
A number of you have already donated; I'm so grateful for your support!
Upcoming features
The things that I plan to work on next include:
- More emails: I want to add in various new types of emails to help drive engagement. For instance, notifying when artists that you follow have added new songs, tips to help new users discover features, song and profile engagement summaries for artists, and so on.
- Release campaigns: I'd like to provide a toolkit that will help artists release songs, with email campaigns, pre-release links and marketing artwork generation.
- Better search: the search system is fine but is missing the ability to use advanced filters, and the search results page needs a design overhaul.
- Importing your song library: currently artists can import their songs from Spotify, but I want to add the ability to import from Bandcamp and Soundcloud, and also to import songs via a spreadsheet or ChordPro.
- Follower interaction: I'd like artists to be able to communicate with people who are following them, e.g. for things like newsletters.
If there are any features that you'd love to see in the platform, please let me know!
What's next?
I just have a few loose ends to tie up, but I'm almost ready to start opening up artist profile creation to more people. Many of you using the platform currently will be friends from Resound Worship's 12 song challenge. The next phase of the platform will involve giving an open invite to anyone from 12 Song to sign up and create their profile, which I'll do by sending out a specific link with an invite code. I'm sure that additional sign-ups will bring a fresh list of feature requests and bug reports.
After this, I'll have to think about how to open the platform up to people from outside our immediate network. There are questions about content moderation that will come up. I don't have all the answers to that right now, but I'm looking forward to going on that journey with you all 🙃
Perhaps the most important thing in all of this is clearly communicating what the site is about and who it's aimed at. When I initially launched the beta back in the summer, there were a lot of questions about the platform's vision, who it was for, what kind of songs were considered acceptable and unacceptable, etc. So I'm going to put together an infographic that lays all of this out, and can be shared around when we open up the platform to all of 12 Song and beyond.
I'm also going to add a page that lists Unified Praise's vision and values, with input from our artists in the Slack channel. My plan is to have is all in place by the end of November, so watch this space! I'll send out another message when we're ready to launch.
Thanks
I know I keep saying it, but I'm grateful to you all for your encouragement and support. I'm really humbled to hear that the platform is filling a need, and I'm excited about the future possibilities. Thank you all.
Blessings,
Jon