When I debuted the “share music page” in 2019, it was really just something I wanted for myself. I wanted a better way to be able to share music in my newsletter so that people could easily find the albums on their preferred streaming platform. But over the past few years I’ve heard from so many people that have used the page to share music with their friends and family as well. I see thousands of songs and albums in the database. To see a small personal project grow to be used by others is the biggest compliment.

As I wrote about last week, I’ve been working on improving my personal blog as a way to keep myself busy and away from doomscrolling. It’s been a fun nightly project to add some new features and start posting more photo and micro blogs when inspiration strikes. The first time I posted an update about something I was listening to I just knew I needed to find a way to combine my sharing project and my blog.

So I did.

Last year, I wrote about the annual state of Chorus in August. The state of the website was, more or less, that costs had increased, ad revenue had decreased, and supporter revenue had more or less stayed the same.

This year, I’m only a couple of months behind my already haphazard schedule of checking in on everything. Packing up a home and moving will toss everything into disarray like that.

The story of the past year is similar, with a few new bright spots.

The website’s costs have remained flat. I forecast that within the next twelve months, I’ll need to upgrade the forum server’s hard drive space again (we’re a little over half full, mostly from image attachments).

Ad revenue continues to be predictable and predictably less than the year before.

Supporter revenue continues to be strong and growing, which is why I can run this website and community.

If there’s one thing we like to do around here, it’s rank things.

From our End of the Year lists to the countless albums/sports/food rankings in the forums, it’s just a tradition at this point. When the conversation dies down, break out a ranking.

The other night, I was lying in bed thinking about the “bias sorter” going around Tumblr in 2018. It originated, I believe, as a way for people to rank their favorite K-pop bands. I’d been using it for the past few years to start my end of the year album rankings. It’s an excellent way to review a list and decide what you like more: A or B. But the problem is that it’s a pain to use. You need to enter each item individually, click enter after each one, and then go through the ranking process. And after you’re done, there’s no good way to do it again without manually re-entering all those items. I started wondering if I could put something together that would let me input any size list of things I wanted, and then it could present them to me one at a time to pick from and give me a final ranking.

I have a reoccurring reminder to reflect on the state of Chorus at least once a year. The idea is to pull all the numbers together, get an idea of how things are going, and make plans for the future of the website. I realized today that I hadn’t done this since 2021.

So, it was a morning of looking at spreadsheets. And I see a few obvious trends. The first is that the cost of running the website has increased. The most significant cost increase comes from our hosting provider unilaterally hiking prices 20% in April after being bought by another company. Cool. Second, the online advertising industry (already tenuous at best) has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. I charted the last two years, and we’re continuing to trend downward.

The music streaming service revolution has been one of the biggest, and most exciting, developments to the music and technology world in my lifetime. We went from driving to a store to buy music, often without ever hearing it beforehand, to having countless hours of music in our pockets with virtually no limits to what we could discover and listen to with the mere press of a button.

As someone that runs a music website, and now a weekly newsletter, that often includes recommendations about new music, I’ve long struggled with just how to share those recommendations with the most people. On this website, I often link to the YouTube video in the post itself for instant listening and then will link to Apple Music and Spotify when appropriate (or if the song isn’t on YouTube yet) since those are the two biggest streaming platforms. I like those short URLS that a lot of labels and PR people are using these days that aggregate all of the streaming platforms into one place for easy sharing; however, what I really wanted was something that I had a little more control over. What if I use a service like this and then it goes under, and all my links die? All of a sudden hours of meticulously linking music recommendations on this website or my newsletter could end up having dead links. So, after coming across the excellent Song.Link service and their API, I decided I would be best served in creating something for myself. That way I could easily create a place to share a song or album, and I wouldn’t have to worry about the URL going away in a few years or it not being updated as streaming services come and go.

The end result is a page that includes links to all the big streaming services, as well as a YouTube video for quick streaming if it exists, and links to purchase the music as well. For example:

• Blink-182 – “Happy Days”
• Mannequin Pussy – “Patience”
• MxPx – “Doing Time”
• Paramore – After Laughter
• Sigrid – Sucker Punch

Read More “A Simple Streaming Music Sharing Page for Chorus”

One of the biggest challenges to running this website has been figuring out a business model that works, and that allows me to sleep well at night. This website is my full-time job, and the income it provides is how I put food on the table. My goal from the start has been to find a way to make this website the only job I have to have.1 Right now I do some consulting work to make up the difference between what the website brings in and what my family needs. The vast majority of the website’s revenue comes from our readers and our supporter system. It’s because of all the people that read this website and visit our forums that it exists.

Over the past two years I’ve played around with a few other ways to bring in additional revenue, the main one being advertising. I set up a self-serve advertising system where anyone could buy display ads on the website, and I priced them way under what most websites charge for the number of impressions they would get. Unfortunately, they never sold as well as I hoped they would. So, it’s time to try something different again.

Read More “Site Update: A Few Changes to the Ad System Coming”