Detail Page redesign … tells an ambitious story

I’ve spent a lot of time on the detail page design. It is ambitious (in features).

Have a look.

Here are the main points:

1. Ability to navigate directly to the next piece, by artist or by category (good for browsing).
2. Listen to the piece directly from the page
3. Tip the artist (or rather, the work). Opt-in module for those who wish to “earn” from their work. Why limit ourselves to either free downloads or paid downloads? Why not have both? Have a look at my previous blog entry for the reasoning behind this.
4. Email me feature. This enables the artist to build a list of ‘communication pipes’ directly with the people interested in their work. This is naturally very valuable.
5. Book Tickets feature. This is really projecting forwards. The aim with this (optional) module would be that Ambisonia could act as a booking agent for specific artists who tour/perform.

There’s a bit of back-end work to implement this detail page…. but you get the concept. This design actually encapsulates several different business models.

1. Tips. Could also be referred to as ‘optional paid downloads’. Site needs to be optimised to encourage people to offer tips. Artist keeps 70% of the tip’s net profit.
2. Email me. Whenever an artist submits a new piece, all of their ‘subscribers’ would be notified automatically. If the artist would like to send out a special email, Ambisonia would charge for the use of that user database.
3. Book tickets. Booking agent functionality.
4. Google Adsense (still trivial earnings, but if there’s enough traffic this could cover server and bandwidth costs).
5. Advertising in the ‘Listen Now’ module. I havn’t illustrated this in the design, but the concept is that when people hit ‘play’ the space above the Quicktime player could display a video advert similar to the kinds of adverts Google wants to do in Youtube.

I’m liking this page design. I feel it is starting to deliver a good experience, a bit of revenue for artist and Ambisonia, and building communicative channels between artist and audience.