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Batch Two and Three of First Impression Blogs

Jason Tate

Last week I posted about bringing over my first impression blogs from the forums for supporters of the website. Today I’ve got a some more to share:

Batch Three

Batch Two

Batch One

I’ve got one more group to move over and then I’ll be posting new ones on the main website, in our review database, roughly one day after they first appear live in our supporter forum.

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Bringing First Impressions to the Main Site

Jason Tate

For as long as I can remember I’ve been doing some version of “first impression” blogs about music on the internet. It started back on AbsolutePunk.net in my blog as I’ve always loved being able to offer some thoughts on an album without the full pressure of an official “review.” My original idea was a more free flowing and less structured way to comment on music usually after having only heard an album one or two times. Today we’ve got things like our forums and social media to serve as a similar medium for putting together opinions on something without it needing to feel too official. I like that. It’s freeing.

One of the things I’ve been doing for supporters in our supporter forum is these first listen/first impression live blogs for certain albums. The basic idea is the same as always: I listen to an album and I do a little live blogging of my thoughts, impressions, and feelings as I listen to it. It started out as a fun little way to talk about music and once again helped me feel free from some of the pressures of “official” reviews on music. It’s been a lot of fun and it seems like everyone really enjoys reading them. Now, one of the downfalls of using the forum for this is that it’s not as easy to archive and save these pieces for posterity. And they’re behind the community package paywall and therefore unaccessible to patrons of the main website. Today, I’m fixing both of those problems.

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Introducing Chorus 2.0

Jason Tate

One of the best parts about running my own website again is that I can work on improvements and changes and roll them out when they’re done instead of waiting for the never ending drudge of bureaucracy. Today I’m excited to bring you a collection of changes, improvements, additions, and new features that I am calling Chorus 2.0. Basically, I’ve spent the past year or so learning about what makes this website work, what doesn’t work, what needs to be improved, and how to better organize the information we push into it each day. And of course, how you, the reader, are using it. I’ve taken what I’ve learned and combined that with an optimization obsession to get this website to load as fast and reliably as possible on virtually any device you view it on. You may not see a lot of outward changes, but there were thousands of lines of code tweaked and changed along the way. I want to quickly go through some of the bigger changes, and introduce you to some of the more headlining features.

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It’s Been a Year

Jason Tate

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:

  • 5,145 articles posted on the main site.
  • 1,004,735 words written in those articles.
  • 895,137 forum posts.
  • 34,766 registered forum members.
  • 891,056 likes given out.
  • 2,000 private messages sent per month (average).
  • 27 podcast episodes recorded (and 3 bonus episodes).
  • Over 160,000 podcast listens.
  • 83,035,328 pageviews.
  • A 6:40 average session time.
  • 13 “first listen” blogs in the supporter forum.
  • 365 days where I was happy with the choice I made.

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Turns Out™ People Like Monthly Options Best

Jason Tate

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!

We Need Your Help: We’re Expanding Our Supporter Packages

Jason Tate

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.

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If You Really Wanna Get Me a Gift

Jason Tate

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.

The First Holidays With Chorus

Jason Tate

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.

Quick Site Update and a Thank You

Jason Tate

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.

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