This week I joined Deanna Chapman on the Missaligned podcast to talk about the first year of running this website, the challenges of making the move, my goals and where we achieved and came up short, and what I hope the next phase and future of Chorus will be. It was, as always, a lot of fun.
You can hear the episode on Soundcloud, Overcast, or iTunes.
Read More “In Lieu of Encore This Week I Spoke With Missaligned”
One year ago I retired AbsolutePunk.net and launched Chorus.fm into the world. I can’t believe it’s been a year. First, I want to thank everyone that’s supported the website for a full year and all of you that kept monthly payments on and re-signed up today with a new yearly subscription. Seriously, thank you. I had no idea if this entire endeavor was ever going to work, and all of the support has truly blown me away. I’ve loved getting to know so many of you over the past year and being able to share this experience with you. Again, I can’t tell you thank you enough.
One year in I figured is as good a time as ever to run down some of the numbers from the last 12 months:
A couple weeks ago I tweaked our supporter program just a bit to put together a few new options at various tiers. It’s been incredible to see so many new people sign up and help us out at all the levels, but one of the more common things I heard was that you all love the monthly options way more than the annual ones. I think I messed up because of my own bias of liking to pay for things upfront, and so I built the program with that in mind. Welp, I think I was wrong. After seeing so many people ask about monthly tiers I’ve inverted what I highlight on our supporter page. The monthly options are now front and center and the annual options are still there but just a little less prominent.
A huge thank you to everyone that gave me feedback on this and a massive thank you to everyone that’s signed up so far. If you haven’t peeped the supporter packages yet, please take a look and/or read my little plea about becoming a member.
I’ve been working on cleaning up the website code, improving all the mobile pages, and making some other little changes to the site over the past few weeks. I’ll be rolling those out in the next few months along with some new features and perks for supporters.
Thanks again for reading!
This April will see the one year mark of when I started Chorus. By and large it’s been the most fulfilling stretch of work in my entire career. It’s been stressful. It’s been intense. But it’s also been extremely fun, challenging, and stimulating. As we come up on this anniversary I’ve been working on the first set of changes I want to make to the website to prepare ourselves for the future. There will be some design tweaks coming shortly, but the first thing I want to focus on is tightening up our supporter program.
Our supporter program has been a resounding success. When I started this project I made the argument that I believed the future of online publishing was going to depend on dedicated readers for websites to continue development and publication. Over the last year I’ve only become more convinced of this direction. And, I’ve been blown away by the first year of support from readers of this website. However, one of the main pieces of feedback I’ve heard is: I love this website, I love what you’re doing and want to help make sure it stays around, but I don’t really want to sign up for a forum membership account, is there any way I can become a patron without needing to join the forum community? My goal was to provide that functionality in the easiest form possible and allow readers to help support our continued existence for mere pennies per day.
If that’s all you need to hear, please take a look at our membership packages and sign up, if you want to be woo’d a little bit more, I’ve a longer pitch for you below.
Read More “We Need Your Help: We’re Expanding Our Supporter Packages”
The schedule for the first part of the year is currently wide open and I’m starting to book them up. If you’ve got a product or service you want to promote to our audience, get in touch.
I just wanted to take a minute to wish everyone a happy holidays and a merry Christmas. I hope everyone is having a great weekend and at the very least enjoying some good food, drinks, family, and entertainment. The Chorus staff and contributors are working on finalizing our end of the year lists and we’ll have those ready for publication right after the new year.
Thanks to everyone that’s read this website this year and/or become a supporting member. Starting and running Chorus has been the most fulfilling months of my career, and I couldn’t do it without all of you. So, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
As we enter December I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for visiting our website each day. November was one of the best months our forum has seen since we launched, and I’m starting to gear up for the new year. I have some ideas to make our membership options a little more straight forward, and streamline everything on that end as we continue to expand coverage and grow our community. In the meantime, a huge thank you to everyone that has become a supporting member and helped us outpace even my conservative estimates of where we might be by the end of the year.
If you’re looking for a Christmas present to get me, think about upgrading your forum account for a year! Or maybe if you do your holiday shopping at Amazon use our affiliate link. Both really do help push us through this relatively slow news, and advertising, period of the music industry.
I hope everyone has been enjoying the new website as much as I’ve being enjoying running it.
I just wanted to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. I hope everyone has a wonderful day no matter what your plans are. We will be on a relaxed posting schedule for the next few days while we recover from stuffing ourselves with food, but we’ll be back in full force on Monday.
Check out the Black Friday / Cyber Monday thread in our forums if you’re looking for some good deals this weekend, and turn the music up if the family gets to be just a tad too much.
One of my favorite things on AP.net was when I got to change the website to the “holiday” theme and let there be light blue snowflakes all around us. Now, with this new website, it’s built in a more minimal style that is harder to really spice up for the winter months. (Although, if you’re a supporter, you’ll see we do have a cool dark theme that’s great for all seasons.) However, I still wanted to bring a little holiday cheer to the website, so you’ll see a special holiday logo change for the months of November and December.
I’m going to continue brainstorming ideas for bringing even more holiday joy to our theme in the next year, but I just wanted to wish everyone a happy start to the holiday season! Thanks for visiting and reading.
I just wanted to take a moment to plug our forums and the supporter upgrade we have available. We’ve now passed a half-million posts on the forum, and are closing in on 20,000 registered members. The website is continuing to grow each month, more people are signing up to help us continue on our journey, and I can’t say thank you enough.
In the next few months we’ll be focusing on expanding our publishing and coverage. So that means more interviews, music and movie reviews, and featured articles. We’ve got an episode of Encore ready to go this week talking about all sorts of stuff, and after our Yellowcard “deep dive” episode did so well two weeks ago we recorded a special episode on the upcoming Jimmy Eat World album that will be out next week.
One of the users on our site, emt0853, recently made a post in our forums about looking for a kidney donor, and I just wanted to take a moment to give the story a little boost:
My journey began in 2007 and I had high hopes that this journey would be a short one. I received the most selfless gift I could imagine, developed a random blood clot happens in LESS than .01% of patients and it didn’t work out. Since then, I’ve had a million ups and downs it seems. Other family illness, personal illness, marriage, and school. I’m finally at the point that I can try again to take the steps to get back to a normal life and get away from dialysis.
During a consultation with Dr. Mikel Prieto, a nephrologist with the Kidney Transplant Program at Mayo Clinic, the suggestion was made to use social media to help my cause of finding a live kidney donor. He believes that I will do much better with a live donor instead of a cadaver donor. (Though not impossible, the wait would be much longer) Since I am younger, he believes this is my best option. Things have changed in the last 7 years, live donor kidneys can last upwards of 30 years.
If you have a few seconds, please read the post. Thank you.
We don’t have a sponsored post this week, so I thought I would take a quick moment and just plug our supporter membership program. Basically, if you like this website, like reading our content, and like hanging out in our forums, this is a way you can help us. It comes with some cool perks, such as:
As I wrote when I first launched this website: I think the best way to make sure something you love stays around is to support it. I’ve been blown away by just how many people have jumped on board and are helping make this website one of the best experiences of my life. We’re a little over four months in and I can honestly say that waking up to work on this project is fulfilling in a way I haven’t felt in years. So thank you, all of you!
We’re currently booking up our sponsorship spots for the next few months, so, if you have a product or service you’d like to put in front of our audience, please reach out to me and let’s talk. We’ve been seeing some fantastic results with display ads and our feed sponsorships. I asked Creep Records’ owner William Angelos how the campaign we put together worked for him, and he had this to say:
I reached out to Chorus.fm when we signed JANK and I could not be happier. The new format has made ad space prominent and the click-through rate has been amazing. At the end of the day, we believed that if people heard JANK, they would love them. Chorus.fm helped immensely through their ads in getting people to give a new band a try. We will be using Chorus.fm for all future releases.
Our wonderful sponsors and amazing supporters have made the first four months of running Chorus feasible and exciting. Almost all of September is already booked up, but we have some openings in August and October and I’d love to get those filled up as well. I hope everyone is having a good day, I’m off to edit this week’s episode of Encore.1
Supporters should check the Encore thread in the supporter forum for a special announcement.↩
Today is the 4th of July holiday so we will be on a more relaxed posting schedule. I hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable day and we’ll be back to our regular schedule tomorrow.
I’m starting to book up July and August on the sponsorship calendar. So, if you’ve got a cool product, album release, or service to promote to our audience, get in touch and let’s fill these spots up. We’ve been seeing really great results from the banner ads and feed sponsorships, and please reach out if you have any questions at all.