Gooood Monday, Slipmatians! 
Last week was yet another busy one here at Slipmat. Our DJs played 104 live events for almost 1000 registered monthly listeners. Huge thanks for both DJs and listeners for making Slipmat such an awesome community to spend your time with at these difficult times 
We’ve also had a few more Frankie Pro subscriptions which now brings our current funding level to ~65%. We’re not quite there to cover all our running costs yet but it’s really nice to have this support from the DJs. Thank You everyone!
Development notes
The early bird subscriptions are now replaced with actual subscriptions, and with that change as promised last week, everyone who purchased an early bird subscription have had their initial subscription interval extended by two extra weeks as a thank you. All the future payments are now done in USD instead of EUR to make it less challenging for our American friends. (Many seem to have hard time understanding that other countries and currencies do exist as well )
Other development was pretty much overshadowed by the work on the new subscription system. We did however push a couple of upgrades to the new Frankie Pro encoders and I wrote some notes on the new settings as well.
Based on the event feedback less than 5% have any problems with the new encoders but if you happen to belong to the unlucky minority, please read Report any issues you are having with Frankie and report your issues there. I’m confident that we’ll be able to fix any issues with some detailed debugging.
There’s been some more visible work going on as well but unfortunately nothing got enough polished to publish just yet. Amongs the upcoming changes are new addon layers for event video (starting with chat and avatar list), new community charts page and a totally revamped homepage.
Our top priorities for upcoming development are:
- better marketing tools for DJs (better video-addons like avatar list and chat screen, archived event page, tracklists as text, commenting / rating, using request system before the event)
- better community features (to make it more fun to visit Slipmat homepage as a listener / community member)
- still keep making the invitation process faster and getting more DJs in
Special thanks to all the members in our Mentors-group who have done excellent work past week for getting 12 new DJs in! Thank You!
Tips for DJs
Learn to use tags properly
Slipmat uses very powerful tagging system that gives lots of power to DJs to categorize their events. This power comes with great responsibility and you should learn the basics of good tagging practises to get the most visibility for you and your events.
In the simplest terms, think tags as keywords of musical genres your event should be found when searched. Tags like “dj” or “live” or “music” are totally pointless as Slipmat is a live streaming site that only hosts live DJ events. Instead, tags like “trance”, “techhouse” and “minimal” are great. Tags don’t need to be proper genres either, you can be creative. If you play multiple formats, “openformat” is the de facto tag to use. If your event is a radio show, you can tag it with “radioshow”. Note that above tags are, like all tags should be, in lower case and use only a-z letters. So no spaces and no special characters.
The more and more descriptive tags you use, the easier your events are to find and the more visibility you get. Tags are one of the easiest ways for you to increase your visibility both on Slipmat and on search engines like Google, use them wisely!
If you take requests, learn to use the request system
One of our most used and loved features is the unique request system. DJs who take requests can significantly increase the interaction with listeners by using it properly. In order to get most out of the system you need to first upload a proper base collection (an exported playlist file of ~500-5000 songs from Traktor, Serato or Rekordbox) that listeners can search from. If you don’t upload a collection, you’ll miss out on most of the functionality.
(Request system is available at the moment on old live page only but this will hopefully get fixed in very near future.)
If you haven’t yet seen how the system works, here’s a short (and old!) video that explains the basics:
Please do not spam me (or others) here or on our community chat
I’ve witnessed a worrying trend of people pinging me with @-mention here on Backstage and on the community chat. Please do not ping me or others if it’s not absolutely necessary. That means ever.
Unless the matter is truly urgent, meaning that things are actually on fire or someone is about to die, there is no point of sending unnecessary notifications. After enough notifications all signals turn to noise so please don’t abuse the system. Everyone who is active here will see your post in time without those mentions, too.
Thanks!
That’s about it for this week. See you around! o/