Artist profile pages
Artist profiles are no longer limited to the handful of default profile tabs. They are now fully customisable. You can:
- Now choose whether you show playlists or albums on your profile
- Use a single playlist as a page, meaning that you can create a custom list of songs to show on a page
- Create completely custom pages with freeform content
- Choose to add a blog (read the next section for more on that)
- Add external links
Each page lets you add custom text, too, so you can really personalise things.
Shoutout to David Brackenbury, who was the first one to use this on his profile, to great effect!
Artist blog
Artists now have an option to blog. To use it, you'll first need to add a page of Blog content type to your profile pages. Then head over to Your blog in your artist settings.
Posts are added using an editor that lets you add headings, images, links, styled text, etc. More features will be added as we go!
You can keep a blog unpublished until you're ready. When you publish, your followers will get a notification that you've posted, and each published post will show on your blog page on your profile.
Newsletters
Artists can now send out email newsletters to their followers. This ties into the followers overhaul, which I'll expand on in the next section. You can use the same editor as used in the blog to create formatted content for your newsletter.
When you're ready, you can send a test email to yourself to check how it will look for everyone else, then you can deliver it to all your followers.
Followers will get emails that look something like this:
Followers overhaul
To tie in with the all the above updates, following artists has been made more useful and intuitive. When you follow an artist, you'll receive notifications and emails when they're active, and get sent newsletters if they choose to use that feature. It's a good way of keeping track of what people are up to, as all you need to do is click a button!
Additionally, every artist now has a follow link that they can send out to friends, which will prompt people to put in their email address to follow them. This will create a Unified Praise account too, bringing them into the UP community. Here's my follow link as an example of what that looks like: https://unifiedpraise.com/artist/jon-cairns?f=follow. Artists can find this link in the Followers section of their artist settings, where they can also see their list of followers.
And more
There are too many changes to discuss while still keeping you interested, so I'll leave it there. There have been a few teething issues - we did an Artist workshop the other day, and I ran into a few bugs. They've all been fixed, but if you spot anything awry then please contact me via our support page or artist Slack channel.
Thanks for supporting Unified Praise!