Roadrunner Web Site Upgrades for January

January saw several improvements to the presentation on our artist pages. Some of these you've already seen, some have only been rolled out in the last few days.

Watching Videos and Downloading Music
As I explained in the internal web report last Friday, the music and video changes we introduced created an upsurge in media usage on www.roadrunnerrecords.com. Take a look at the Airbourne page for reference.

The prominent "Download Now" button under Free Music will get you an mp3 right on your desktop. In the Free Video section, we've introduced a scroller. Simply hover over it with your cursor and move the cursor to the right and then the left within the scroller. Clicking on a thumbnail will open the video in its own section right on the page, without ever leaving the artist content.

When there are not enough video thumbnails, the scroller reverts to a "Watch Now" button taking the visitor to the standard video page. (See that in action on the Opeth page before we get a kickass promo video through the door!)

Buzzword Bingo: User-Generated Content
So all has produced great, tangible results so far, but what about making all of that fan energy work for us? I'm glad you asked. Last May Andrew and I created the Within Temptation tour mini-site. I promised at the time that eventually a lot of what you saw there would make it to the Roadrunner web site.

Promise fulfilled.

Take a look at the DragonForce artist page. You probably noticed this at Airbourne, but since DragonForce is smack in the middle of fan interaction on the interwebs, we'll take it from there.

See the sections below Free Music and Free Video with a bunch of little thumbnails? They're labeled Your Photos from Flickr and Your Videos from YouTube. I'm sure everyone is familiar with YouTube by this point. (If not you should probably put the romance novel down and join 2006 at www.youtube.com.)

flickr may be new to you. It's basically a very popular photo site used by professionals and amateurs alike. It's very malleable and a wonderful place to create photo albums, slideshows, and more. What's even better is that it provides RSS feeds of most of its content.

Both the YouTube and flickr strips are scrollers like the Free Video one. Feel free to play around with them. When you click on a flickr photo, it will pop up in the center of your screen without leaving the main artist area. The same goes for the YouTube video, which you can watch right there and then come back to all the DragonForce news we post each week.

All fans have to do at either site is "tag" the photo or video with "dragonforce" and it'll eventually show up on our site. A tag is like a note left with the photo giving a description of what's in the photo.

If you click on the Video or Photo Gallery tabs to the left on any artist page, the respective strip will appear there as well.

Gaining Control
We recently began rolling out Wikipedia-based bios on the site on a limited basis. With input from the marketing staff, we've introduced another innovation in the creation of a tabbed biography. This allows us to present both the wikipedia bio and the official bio at the same time. Check out the Dream Theater bio for a great example.

There are still some formatting issues with these, but in general they all look great and give us something we didn't have before: an active, yet painless hand in influencing the direction of information on Wikipedia about our artists.

Whatever your opinion about Wikipedia, it's where our fans are going. Try a Google search for Dream Theater and their bio is the #2 link. Now we're actively sending fans to these bios to help clean them up. What's more we're sending them to Wikipedia with all the official information and content right there for them to use.

And, in the not-unlikely event of someone vandalizing say, the Slipknot entry with "Slipknot is gay," the bio can be reset on our site with the push of a button.

Minor Revamping
In addition to these uber-cool changes, we've introduced a minor, but effective one to our overall Artists page.

View it here.

Being able to feature certain bands on that page is a pretty obvious innovation I'm sorry I missed bringing to the table for the last year. Thanks to Jon and Andrew, we can now pull out and feature specific bands.

The Next Six Weeks
Expect tweaks and styling changes to all of these as we discover what works best. Also expect a wholesale revamp of the design and usability of our artist pages. We solicited and received a proposal and comps for a redesign of the artist pages that takes them to another dimension entirely. Expect a robust tool with which to super-serve our acts in the coming weeks.