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:
- Ability to navigate directly to the next piece, by artist or by category (good for browsing).
- Listen to the piece directly from the page
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Book tickets. Booking agent functionality.
- Google Adsense (still trivial earnings, but if there’s enough traffic this could cover server and bandwidth costs).
- 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.
