Slipmat Week Notes 19/2020

Good Hello everyone!

It’s been difficult trying to adjust back to everyday life after the busy weekend. The first ever virtual Slipmat Festival was truly a great success. With so much potential of everything going awfully wrong, we only had a couple issues during the events and zero technical issues. The audience had a blast and the artists seemed to enjoy themselves also. Couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome!

Once more, Thank You everyone who were there to make it happen! :slight_smile:

great success win GIF

Development Notes

The site development is now starting again with full steam ahead. We’ll be hopefully getting some big changes later this week but some of it is already here.

We now have a new (new, /m/) homepage. The design is not at all final or finished but it’s a start for something that will hopefully serve us a long time. In the upcoming days and weeks we’ll be upgrading all of the other pages to this new format as well and when this work is done, we’ll finally be able to get rid of the old format pages, including the old live page. (The current situation is frustratingly confusing as we have two of everything but it’s also the only way for us to split this update into small chunks, so with our tiny development hours this is the most viable way to move forward.)

The first new addition to the homepage is a list of most recent recordings which gives listeners much better visibility to this interesting content on the site. The new homepage now also displays all the content to visitors as well, so no more empty pages for first time visitors. This is just the very beginning, there’s a lot more to come.

With this change all links to live events now point to the new live page. If you are a DJ and get confused where the old page (and the event admin controls) is, just open the hamburger menu from the top right corner and you’ll find a link to the old live page.

As we’re now starting the migration to the new tipping system that will be available for all DJs, the old Stripe-based tipping is no longer available on the old page. When the new system gets deployed, the tipping experience will be unified, and again, available for all DJs.

Lastly, we finally have a blog! This is something we probably should have done years ago but never got around to it. Blogs are great for communicating longer and deeper thoughts and for writing down notes of interesting changes in the DJ and livestreaming world. The comments are integrated with Backstage so it’s very easy to participate in the discussions. Please dm me if you want to write to Cue the Blog, it’s for everyone in the community who are able and willing to write interesting content. You’ll find Cue the Blog at blog.slipmat.io and the posts and the comments are right here on Backstage.

Tips for DJs

:white_check_mark: Learn to promote yourself on Slipmat

When you go to your DJ Dashboard and edit your DJ profile, make sure to fill in all relevant details. If you are a professional or serious hobbyist, you should have every single detail filled. The better details you have in your DJ (and listener) profile, the more you get out of Slipmat.

We’ve talked a lot about generic marketing but one basic thing usually is missing from all these advice: remember to preview all your changes. For example, as I’m writing this, there are 6 events with recordings highlighted on the homepage, of which 50% have broken links. (Working example, non-working example.) The recording embed HTML excepts HTML embed, not a URL as text. Hence, if you use it wrong, it will not work properly. This is the philosophy throughout the site: we give you very powerful tools that enable you to do amazing things but also to shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t pay attention.

:white_check_mark: Starting end ending events properly

Slipmat live events emulate real life events. Just like in a physical event, on Slipmat you can and should open your scheduled event in warmup mode at least 30 minutes before starting time. This gives your audience time to flow in and yourself time to make final preparations and make sure that everything is set up correctly. Pop in to chat and talk with the audience if you have time, it sets up the mood.

If you don’t have another event ready for redirect after your set, you should also have a short cooldown period for your event. This is a mistake in the Slipmat event flow as there is no separate mode for cooldown. Because of that most new DJs end the event as soon as they end playing, which kills the chat and effectively kicks the audience to the street. You definitely don’t want to do that. Leave at least a couple of minutes to everyone to say thanks and goodbyes and maybe plan together what to do next and where. For Slipmat 3 we’ll fix this mistake and events will have a proper cooldown period where the set has ended but the chat still stays automatically on for a while.

:white_check_mark: Learn the instrument

Think Pioneer CDJ 2000 NXS2. An awesome piece of kit. It has play, cue, pitch and platter like most players which allows pretty much every DJ on the planet to get a tune playing. Someone somewhere probably has one sitting in some corner autocue turned off, just playing CD:s from track to track. But the device is hardly meant for playing CDs. It has so much cool and deep features packed in that it takes weeks just to find all of them.

Slipmat is very much like this NXS2. You can just take your streaming keys and fire up a live stream but that’s just barely scratching the surface. If you want to raise your game as a live streaming DJ, you should take your time and learn the deeper stuff. That’s all the pro-stuff that separates Slipmat from other platforms and gives you unique tools to grow.

Few pointers to get you started:

That’s it for this week. See you around! :slight_smile:

6 Likes

Fantastic update - Thanks @uninen as always for your tireless efforts on Slipmat!

Great work! But I noticed something. Live events now shows at the bottom of the front page. Intentional or unintentional?

Unintentional :smiley:

Good catch! Mixed the orderings a bit for the festival events and forgot to put them back. This is now fixed and the new version in production. Thanks for the report :slight_smile:

1 Like

Heya, how about the Artists page? Coming soon? :slight_smile:

You mean a new artists-page? Like this old one: https://slipmat.io/artists/ ?

Don’t know if that simple list view makes sense as we grow but yes, something like that plus new pages for individual artists and (upcoming and archived) events are indeed coming. We want those to look a bit less “hello from 2003” so it’s gonna take some time to get every corner cleaned up :slight_smile:

Yeah, ok that is what i meant. Just a page where ppl could check what kinda artists slipmat has :slight_smile: But really good that also individual artist-pages coming! :level_slider:

Yeah, we need a search functionality also but before that I’m thinking replacing the tags -page with a better “discover”-feature that would allow you to easily browse interesting categories and see and hear right from there what Slipmat has to offer.

At least for me it would be better to be able to browse tags like “trance” and “house” and to see artists related to that (based on what you have been tagging your events with) and also be able to listen some recordings and see track lists etc. On top of that, we’ve been planning to do these very deep and detailed genre pages for selected genres with TOP-lists (based on playlists artist submit) and handpicked news from Backstage (requires the community actually post the news :smiley: ) etc.

So many ideas an so much to do, so little time…

1 Like