In June 2003, I launched a little music website. I had never launched a website before, had never really written or edited professionally and didn’t know html. So as you can imagine, there were some growing pains.
The first incarnation of Muso’s Guide was built (by someone else) in Microsoft Frontpage. There was no content management system, every article had to be hand-coded by copying and tinkering and linking up and oh my God, the faff.
I soon got quite handy at html (hand-coding page upon page, day upon day, will do that for you) and eventually found a student web developer to build a new-look site with a PHP content management system in exchange for beer money. It was like slipping into a hot bath. The new site was a million times better and did us proud for a couple of years.
The site is predominantly content-led. New music is reviewed by a team of volunteer writers, who are selected and nurtured and appreciated because they may be volunteering but they write better than many paid staffers I’ve worked with.
Many are, in fact, paid professionals during the day, looking to write unclipped by night, many more have since become paid professionals.
The premise was (and is) a guide to all things music, geographically (with city guides), chronologically (with classic albums and historical features) and critically (with new releases reviewed). We review singles too, actually we love singles, and this is now a rare thing.
We eventually relaunched in 2008 entirely using a Wordpress platform. Heaven.
I love our little site. I love all the writers. I love Catherine and Natalie who handle day-to-day editorial like a tighter and more-motivated unit than plenty of offline section editors… I love knowing that I made something from nothing. I love that it has helped launch the careers of some brilliant people. I love that it springboarded me onto a career and taught me lessons in things I didn’t know existed, that now occupy my mind every other second. I love that I found my husband through it (he was one of the earliest writers).
But if I launched in 2009, I would do everything differently. Muso’s Guide would not look or behave in the same way. At all.
Here’s what I’d do:
Open everything
The writers we have on Muso’s are brilliant. But on Musosguide3.0 everyone would – or rather could – be a writer. A smaller, exceptionally gifted, tier of users would be editors.
The writers whose work was most appreciated (through reader ratings and links) would be seen as power-contributors, whose future work was automatically weighted slightly higher, and given more time in key spots. I trust our audience to like good stuff. If they like it, it’s probably good. You’ll probably like it too.
I’d still have Catherine and Natalie using their human touch to flag up brilliant features and heart-soaring reviews, but I wouldn’t waste their time with uploading the copy and linking up the pictures.
On Muso’s Guide we make mistakes, because everyone makes mistakes. But on Musosguide3.0, far more people could correct mistakes, far quicker, using wiki technology.
Link out and share
Our current writers don’t just write for us, and that’s ace. They hone their skills elsewhere, online and off, they spread their name – which in turn helps promote us, via them. They pick up knowledge and are helped to refine their skills by more people. All our writers are encouraged to tell us if they have a website, which we will link to from their biogs that appear at the end of all their work.
That’s not enough.
On Musosguide3.0, every writer who contributes would have links to their other work from across the breadth of the web available to readers. Perhaps it would be in a sidebar of links “More from this writer”, perhaps through a profile page. It would probably be dynamic. But it would happen. It’s fair and it’s sensible and it shows faith in their work.
Just like today, the best writers would be able to receive pre-release material for review but also be free to add reviews of releases and pre-releases they’ve heard under their own steam.
Content is king – but not always your content
Fairly early on, I started to pull in content from other sites. This was a hamfisted affair, writing to the webmasters whose sites I liked, asking to use content in exchange for a linkbacks etc. RSS was yet to reach my Birmingham kitchen.
Now, on the newest incarnation, it’s easy to pull in RSS content from other sources, but it’s stuffed in the corner somewhat, it’s certainly not integrated seamlessly, enhancing our own content and building back story to everything we cover.
On Musosguide3.0, there would be no end to information and signposting. A city guide to the music scene in Copenhagen would include maps (from Google), video (from various sources via Apture), links to other city guides, galleries of real life images (from Flickr), real life clouds of discussion in real time (via Twitter) a list of great hotels (from TripAdvisor), a list of upcoming gigs (from all manner of gig guides and events planners) and links to artists pages for anyone local mentioned.
It would be an entry point that could take you absolutely anywhere in a chain of growing (snowballing) interest and learning.
I’d be more dynamic
Dynamic content and feeds scare writers and creative people. They think they’re being usurped by robots and spamsters. They’re not.
Why have three people on three different sites churning out the same stuff. Or – more likely – three thousand or three hundred thousand? That’s not artisan. That’s not keeping a tradition going. That’s just wasting everyone’s time.
Using dynamically clustered content, pulled in through feeds, for back story, breaking news and breadth, frees up writers to be creative, to produce unique, heartfelt content that isn’t churnalism but that has a wealth of information to link to as a backdrop. It frees writers to be writers.
I wouldn’t be scared to be commercially-minded
When I started Muso’s Guide, I pretended to be bigger and more professional than I was – which wasn’t hard as I was working from my kitchen, surrounded by the detritus of two small children. I thought and talked bigger and had a lot of people fooled until the site genuinely was bigger.
While the site was in its infancy, and I was finding my feet and scrabbling up the steep learning curve, quite a few people approached me about advertising on the site. I was too scared to get back to them. Terribly, I ignored their emails.
This was pre-Google Adsense. This was before we had a content management system that could handle ads. And instead of seeing it as an opportunity to develop commercially, to look at my options, to seek advice, I hid in my kitchen.
Now I would grab those opportunities with both hands. I would look to layer on commercial content that would genuinely enhance the site. I would look to use contextual ads strategically and use the money to continue to develop and improve the site.
I’d look to give Catherine and Natalie some of that money, and to at least put some behind the bar for the next Muso’s contributors’ meet-up. (There’s still room for real life in the Musosguide3.0 scenario).
Users are stakeholders
I’ve met people who have told me that loved the site. It’s really touching and very awkward, because it makes me shy. The first time I knew they loved the site was when they told me. That’s a wasted opportunity for them and me.
If someone loves something you create, they should be able to tell you, so you can thank them for their support. And they should be able to tell other people, so they can come and enjoy the creation too.
On Musosguide3.0, users will be visible. They’ll be visible en masse (in their ratings, their time spent on articles and movement around the site informing dynamically generated indexes of content), and they’ll be visible as individuals. They’ll have profiles, they’ll have personalised space and they’ll have the freedom to share: their playlists, their comments, their requests, their complaints even.
The new Musosguide won’t call itself an ‘online magazine’, because when you consider that phrase you realise just how wrong we all went a few years ago. The new Musosguide will be where you organise, display and develop your musical life online.
It will be the hub of your musical activity. It will be where you discover new music and share tips. It will be the platform for organising and buying tickets to gigs and festivals, where you can pull through your last.fm or blip playlists, and those of other people. It will be where you find out what people who liked your favourite band also liked, and what you may like too.
So, keen eyes will spot the future tense…
It should be great, it just depends if we dare build from the ground up all over again.
Holly Seddon
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