Tag Archives: Premium

About music4dance

Is music4dance becoming too popular?

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I first published music4dance in 2013 and, within a year or so, started seeing traffic measurable in the thousands of active users per month. Usage plateaued there for over a decade, but last year, the numbers started climbing rapidly – into ranges better measured in tens of thousands. Now these are very rough measures from analytics, and there are some conflating issues which I’ve noted on my tech blog if you’re interested. And, very importantly, there has been a steady increase over the years of highly engaged users – those of you who vote on dances, email me with issues, and generally keep me mostly in line with dance knowledge.

In any case, the issue at hand is that music4dance has never paid for its own server costs, which has been fine with me in the past, because I get enough out of running the site that I am willing to cover the server costs, and I count my time as well rewarded by the support of the community. However, running a site open to the public has the quirk that expenses can be unbounded as traffic scales, or conversely, the site can slow down as traffic increases.

Music4dance has both of those problems. I haven’t done the engineering work to allow all resources to scale with usage. So things will slow down as more people use the site, possibly to the point of making it unusable, depending on the number of users and what they are doing. On the other hand, some resources are unbounded, such as network traffic costs, so I’ve seen costs spike.

Now, this would all be good if revenue scaled with usage, as an order-of-magnitude or more increase in revenue from both ads and subscriptions would not only cover current costs but also let me put in place some of the things that make a site scalable. However, revenue is not scaling at the same pace as traffic.

Ad revenue has grown by less than double, and since it’s only ever covered a small fraction of my costs, that’s extremely disappointing. I suspect that many people have ad blockers running, and I recently noticed that running my browser in incognito mode appears to act as an ad blocker, so many people may just not be seeing ads. Besides, ads uglify the site.

Subscription revenue has increased over the last year (thank you, everyone, who has subscribed or renewed, I really appreciate the support). And also thank you, everyone, who has spread the word and helped create the “problem” I’m dealing with now – please keep it up; the last thing I want is for usage to go down as the solution.

Given those two factors, I’m going to put on my (very shabby) marketing hat and start moving the site to a purely subscription-based model rather than the current hybrid ad and subscription model. Let’s see what we can do about getting some of the wonderful dancers who use the site regularly to add a premium subscription to music4dance to their budgets. To this end, I’m reducing the number of pages that show ads and replacing them with an obvious (but hopefully not too annoying) plea to create an account and upgrade to a premium subscription. If this works, I’ll eventually remove external ads completely.

Why am I telling you all of this?

  • If you are a premium subscriber and start seeing new messages asking for your support, please let me know – that would be a bug. My promise to premium subscribers to keep the site ad-free for them is intended to include this kind of “internal” advertising as well.
  • If you aren’t a premium subscriber yet but get something from the site, please consider subscribing.
  • If you find these nudges annoying and would prefer to support the site in another way (or already are), please get in touch with me. For instance, I had considered writing code to drastically reduce the number of nudges for folks who cast many votes or add many songs per month. But I think we can accomplish this manually for now, and I’ll write the code if it becomes an issue (and would be very happy to do so).
  • Since this whole line of reasoning is based on server load, please let me know if you’re seeing significant sluggishness when using the site. I’m especially interested in which pages you notice and when this happens. I am working on ways to reduce those issues without drastically increasing costs, and I can be more effective in my efforts if I have actual reports of sluggishness.

Thanks again to everyone who is already contributing to music4dance in one way or another. I hope this wasn’t too in the weeds of the business of running the site. I promise next time to get back to some fun features of the site or to an observation about music and dance.

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And, as previously noted, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Special Occasions

Dance Pride

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Each year Spotify does a number of fun playlists in support of Pride weekend.  With this being the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, they pulled out all the stops. 

Not surprisingly, there is a lot of overlap between these playlists and songs that are great for partner dancing.  And I’m not just talking about disco music.  I’ve been listening to several of these playlists including Pride Classics and Disco Fever.  The surprise is that it wasn’t until the end of Pride month that it occurred to me that it would be fun and possibly useful to cross reference some of the Pride playlists with the music4dance catalog.

But better late than never.  Click here to see the full list.  You can get to the pride catalog anytime by going to the “Music” menu, choosing the “Tags” option and then finding the “Pride” button.  Clicking on that will pop up a menu that will let you list all the songs tagged as “Pride.”  I’ve also added tags for the specific playlists that Spotify built, so you can use the same method to get to the Disco Fever, Pride Classics or Fierce playlists.

Remember, there is a lot of subjectivity to what someone finds to be a danceable song.  So please sign in and express your opinion by voting on that for your favorite songs and dances. 

If you’re a premium member you can see the full Spotify lists, even the ones that we didn’t already have cross-referenced, by clicking the “Change Search” button on the results and then choosing “Not categorized by dance” and then “Search.”  Then you could go and add what you would dance to any of the songs that are uncategorized.

As always, I’d love to hear your feedback.

About music4dance

Check out our new Bonus Content Feature

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As of this writing the publicly visible music4dance catalog contains just over twenty seven thousand songs.  But the underlying index contains well over forty six thousand songs.  So what’s the deal with the missing twenty thousand songs?  These are song listings that I’ve pulled in one way or another but aren’t complete in some way.

  1. All of the songs must have been matched to an entry in one of the publisher catalogs that we search.
  2. Each song must have been tagged with at least one dance style.

I believe that these are perfectly reasonable constraints and help to reduce confusion for a novice user. However, there is a whole lot of information indexed in our catalog that people aren’t seeing and could be of some use.

One of the things that people often do on the site is to search for ideas for songs to dance to.  They will search for an artist name or a fragment of the title of a song and see what comes up.  This works great, but of course, the more songs that can be searched the more likely that you’ll get a useful idea.  The songs that are in the bonus section have had less scrutiny, many of them probably have small typos or other inaccuracies in the title or artist that prevented them from being matched to a publisher’s catalog.  Or they might be obscure songs that just aren’t as easily available on Spotify or Amazon.  In either case, I think getting to these additional songs is useful to the expert user sleuthing for the interesting or obscure song to choreograph to or surprise their dancers with.

Another case is where someone is looking for a song of a particular tempo but doesn’t necessarily need it to be specifically for one of the dance styles that we currently catalog.  This might be because they’re looking for something to dance to in a different style that might have a specific  tempo requirement but doesn’t necessarily have some of the other requirements for partner dancing.  One case that comes to mind is tap dance music, but I’m sure there are others.  One could potentially use this for finding running or exercise music of a specific tempo.

If you’re interested in exploring this, here’s how:

As always, I’m interested in your feedback. Please let me know if this feature seems useful to you. Or even better, let me know how you use this feature so that I can add that to common use cases and blog about it in the future.