For past four years Slipmat has been a fairly small community, financed only by the donations of the staff and a tiny party of the active community. Lately our services have grown to include a industry-leading streaming engine and, among others, a worldwide CDN platform that enables smooth operation to all parts of the globe and an email service that allows us to send tens of thousands of notifications, invitations and other communications each month. Running all these services is not free and we need to find a sustainable way to continue operations.
Streamer trial limited to 14 days, new pro engines coming
Starting today, our trial streamer engine keys will be limited to 14 days. All new DJs will get a free 14 day trial and all current keys will expire on April 6.
After the trial period you need to use some other streaming engine or upgrade to our pro engines. The pro engines will use the same state of the art Frankie tech but offer better quality and also automatic audio recording. We’re also exploring some other interesting possibilities like live stream forwarding / restreaming. Instead of working manually with video URLs, the new engines will be much easier to use as well.
Furthermore, we’re implementing a crowdsourcing feature to the event page that allows the audience to support the DJ by donating them a subscription.
The base price for pro streamers will be less than 10 EUR a month and if you have tipping enabled, you can use your untransfered tips to purchase a subscription. There will also be option for event-based keys as well so instead of a monthly subscription, so if you only spin rarely you’ll be able to buy pro streaming keys per-event basis. Based on the event data from past 6 months I expect that vast majority of DJs will be able to spin events effectively for free on Slipmat.
Commercial support
So far we haven’t offered any official technical support as everything has been run for free by the community. With the introduction of the new streaming engines we’ll also now offer commercial technical support for all Slipmat DJs.
If you don’t want to read the available documentation or if you just want some personal assistance in anything related to Slipmat, you can now buy support hours and get personal 1:1 support. Support tickets will start from 49 euros.
The support process is brand new so it will take some time to get all the pieces together. For now, if you need commercial support, DM me and I’ll send you instructions.
Community donations
Many DJs and listeners have asked about ways to support Slipmat operations by donations. So far the only practical way has been by donating event tips to Slipmat. You can still do that as well, but we’ll be opening up new proper channels for both DJs and listeners to send actual donations to Slipmat. All this money will go towards paying the basic infrastructure. These changes will be visible on the site with the next couple of upcoming releases.
If we at any point start getting more money from streamer subscriptions and donations, we will open more free to use streaming engines for everyone.
Important note about Slipmat services and money
I’m personally very sensitive about introducing features here on Slipmat that could increase the divide between wealthy and not so wealthy people. While many other sites have features that allow you to buy status or visibility with money, I’ve been very much against that. Instead of wealth we should promote talent and participation.
For example letting your audience to sponsor your streamer means that everyone has an equal chance to impress listeners to offer a small donation. If you happen to have the money this doesn’t matter much, but if you don’t, being able to essentially advance with your talent instead is a big deal.
We want to keep looking more opportunities like this in the future and things like leaderboards for community participation etc are now starting to sound like a good idea. If we at some point gain a chance to offer monetary rewards for these things, we’ll definitely do it. (One very old idea has been to arrange community festivals which would distribute all the proceedings straight to the DJs. This sort of stuff we want to promote here!)
But for now, the most important thing is to make changes to get the basic operations sustainable.
