Check out my recent album review of Ilan Rubin’s solo project The New Regime, and my Q&A with him:

The New Regime’s Coup

Brian

http://www.twitter.com/bwhalley

If you’re on Twitter, you should be following @ourstage. You’ll find out about official OurStage blog posts, newsletters, artist updates, and other promotional/editorial information before ANYONE else!

Everyone around here knows Daniel.
He’s the public face of OurStage for all the days and nights, especially amongst artists. So what do I do as the Community Manager? Everything that doesn’t involve being the super-public face. I manage all of the content review here (making sure that songs are in the right channels on the site, that we have all the channels we want, etc.), and I create and manage all of our email newsletters and messaging. When you get your weekly Artist Update or Fan Charts, or other special messaging during the week about new promotions, which is something that I put together. There’s a team of three that write all of the newsletters – Daniel, myself, and our staff copywriter who helps make sure that what we’re putting in the newsletter is legible and fun to read.

I also make a lot of the content pages for the site – such as our Artist Success Stories page, updating our Free Tracks pages, and handling the other administrative details of the site like the Duplication License page, or the bestfit@ourstage.com email address where I dispense channel advice to our artists who want to know where they should enter their songs.

If you’re one of the people that has been on OurStage for a long time, you might also know me from all the customer support I used to do, responding to the emails people sent from the Contact Us page.

Is there something you’re looking for OurStage to do to help your career that we’re not doing? Let me know.

Thanks!
Brian
Community Manager

Links: Subscribe to the OurStage Newsletter

Hey folks!

You may have noticed already that our lineup of channels on the site has changed a little. While there’s only one new channel this month (say hello, Modern Rock!), we’ve changed the order that the channels are displayed in. In the past, they had always been semi-alphabetic. That is, they were alphabetical except for a couple of sub-genres that it didn’t make sense to split up. Death Metal and Metal were grouped together, and Rap, Hip-Hop, and Alt. Hip-Hop were next to each other too. Other than that, the channels were always alphabetical.

No longer!

We now order the channels by an overall genre grouping. This way, all of the Rock channels are together, all of the Hard Rock are together, Electronic/Techno channels are together, etc. The list is still alphabetical inside of those larger categories. And yes, we put Rock at the top since it is by far our most popular set of channels. We didn’t see any point in burying the most popular stuff at the bottom!

Going forward on OurStage, you’ll see more things being billed towards these larger genres as well. For example, when we say “Country”, we’ll usually mean people in the Country,, Americana, and Trad. Country channels unless we specifically call out the Country channel by itself. We’ll keep working to make these larger ‘superchannels’ more clear and distinguished throughout our site as well. You may not notice this change right away – but it’ll make more sense as time goes on and we offer more promotions and rewards to people based in what community on OurStage they are in. Please, let me know what you think about the changes. Love them? Why? I’m always open to feedback! Or, if you have any other questions about OurStage or why things are the way they are, let me know.

Brian
Community Manager

Check out the OurStage iPhone app! It’s awesome!

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=293124279&mt=8

You can play your recommendations or stream channels, favorite and thumb items, and more. I’ve been playing music from it all morning while I write the Artist Update. :)

See you all there!