Wonderful start of a new week Slipmatians! 
Last week and especially the weekend was very busy here on Slipmat. Our DJs played collectively over 10 days worth of music in over 100 events to nearly 700 registered listeners during last week. What an amazing way to bring joy to this bleak world – Thank You everyone 
I’m also very happy to happy to tell you that 9 earlybird subscriptions for Frankie Pro encoders has already been purchased, with a total sum that covers almost 30% of direct Slipmat running costs. As the subscriptions were just introduced on Friday, I’m somewhat hopeful that we might actually be able to keep Slipmat running as an independent community-funded project for the foreseeable future 
What’s even more awesome, a majority of these subscriptions were bought by the listeners. In other words we have made crowdfunding possible for DJs!
Upcoming changes on Slipmat
Our focus on Slipmat development has somewhat changed due to the the current world situation. Our continuing mission will be to help DJs to connect with their fans in a safe and privacy-minded way and to keep building this platform as a tool for DJs to earn money.
During past couple of weeks I’ve heard number of times comments like “oh, this is really good for DJs” and “wow, you’ve though of everything”. I’m sure we haven’t thought of everything but we have spent huge amount of time in building a platform for specifically DJs. Slipmat is not yet another Twitch or FB live, we are a community for DJs by DJs. To keep it this way your help is vital. Please keep those bug reports and feature suggestions coming!
Our top priorities for the upcoming weeks:
- making the invitation process faster and getting more DJs in
- getting Frankie Pro encoders online and running smoothly
- finalizing the subscription-related functionality (proper subscription screen for DJs, automated ways to downgrade and upgrade and cancel, etc.)
- better aftermarketing tools for DJs (archived event page, tracklists as text, commenting / rating, automatic event audio embedding)
- better community features (to make it more fun to visit Slipmat homepage as a listener / community member)
Tips to DJs
There was a question in our community chat if you are allowed to play all music genres on Slipmat. To that I have only one answer:
But for more pressing issues, I’ve seen some really cool stuff and also some not so cool stuff I wanted to share with you to make everyones Slipmat experience that much better
Creative uses for Bulletin-tab
Crimsom FM uses the Bulletin-tab in a really cool way in her sets. In addition to some information and links to buy her music, she added a Bandcamp player right in the tab so the listeners could preview her music right on the live page. As the Bulletin tab doesn’t yet have a proper way to preview or edit the content live, you’ll probably need to launch a couple of private events to get the content spot on, but this is just one example of how you can be creative with the possibilities Slipmat gives you. 
Learn to promote your events
Many digital DJs aren’t used to promoting their events. Slipmat, much like the physical world venues, is not Facebook with millions of people online at any given moment. Even worse than that we’re not even backed by a company with a marketing budget. Our marketing budget is zero. If you want proper amount of listeners in your sets, you need to promote it.
The smaller fanbase you have, the more work you need to do to get your Slipmat events filled. Start from wherever your fans or friends are, just by for example posting a couple of times to Facebook. First, “hey everyone, here’s a link to my upcoming live gig” a day or two before the event and another post when you go live.
Look at examples of some of our more experienced streamers like Phoole who spends a huge amount of time promoting her events both before and after the shows. The difference of good promoting and marketing is between a handful of random listeners and reliably having 100+ listeners tune in to your shows.
If you’re interested in growing your fanbase, we have a good tutorial available for promoting Slipmat events here: How to promote your live events
Do not use other DJs events as your personal tech support channel
If you are a DJ, you know how disorienting and frustrating it is to play when there is something else than dancing going on on the dancefloor during your set. Joining to someones Slipmat event only for asking support questions is incredibly rude and I encourage any DJ who sees someone acting like this to mute or ban them from the event.
Unless explicitly stated that the event is for tech support, please let your fellow DJs and their listeners to enjoy music. Use Backstage and your community chat instead, or purchase a ticket for commercial support. In your own events you can of course do whatever you want.
Thank You
Our site is only as good as our community. And what a community we have here
I’d first like to thank from the bottom of my heart each and every one who purchased a Frankie pro subscription and especially everyone who donated to Slipmat as well. Thank You! Your support will help us keep the encoders running.
There have also been lots of help from community in onboarding new DJs. Special thanks to in no particular order: @oxy, @satai, @frohike1 and @DrBones for helping out with mentoring, and all newcomer DJs for finding all new bugs and reporting inconsistencies in the UI.
As the times in the physical world are getting darker, let’s keep making Slipmat even brighter safe haven for all of music lovers
