[FM] Mojam/Musi-Cal update - January 2001

[Skip Montanaro]

My apologies if you've seen this note in other forums.  I meant to send it
to the folkmusic list the same time it went to folkvenu and folkbiz but got
the email address wrong.  It was one of those days...

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The holiday season came and went, and amazing as it seems, Musi-Cal is six
years old.  Mojam had a pretty good Y2K, considering the overall condition
of the tech sector.  We are still in business, which is more than can be
said for a lot of dot coms.  Still, this has been a year of adaptation to a
changing marketplace, and we expect to continue in change mode for some time
to come.  It's been quite awhile since I last sent an update out to our
users and felt I ought to let you know what's been happening.

In this update, we have

    * Ticket Links and Prices
    * Data Licensing
    * Contributions
    * Database Changes
    * Ratings
    * Demographic Survey
    * Affiliate Program
    * Domain Name Switch
    * Banner Ads
    * Miscellaneous


As always, if you have any questions or comments about the Mojam or Musi-Cal
websites, please let me know.

Cheers,

Skip Montanaro (skip@mojam.com)
Support the Mojam.com Affiliates Program: http://www.mojam.com/affl/
(847)971-7098

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Ticket links and prices
-----------------------

We have worked hard to develop revenue streams other than the traditional
banner ad thing.  We have entered relationships with a couple primary ticket
vendors (TicketWeb and Acteva) and a couple ticket brokers (TicketsNow and
TicketCity) to feature ticket referral links on our sites.  We get a varying
cut of any sales that are made via these links.

Coupled with ticket sale links, we recently added a ticket price field to
our database.  When we have price information it will be displayed
underneath the purchase ticket link (or alone in the same field if we don't
have a ticket link).  We are still incorporating price fields into our
submission forms, but the various submission forms on the Musi-Cal site
starting from

    http://www.musi-cal.com/submit.shtml

all have price fields.

We are actively trying to recruit online ticket vendors who would like to
submit their events to Musi-Cal and Mojam.  If you have contacts at online
ticket vendors, please pass this message along to them. They can have their
events promoted through our service.

Data licensing
--------------

The major change to the way we do business the past year has been to expand
our data licensing.  If you submit concert information to either Mojam or
Musi-Cal, besides being displayed on our websites, it is displayed on such
varied sites as

    MyCity:	http://www.mycity.com/
    NBCi:	http://www.nbci.com/
    InfoSpace:	http://www.infospace.com/

Unfortunately, many of our data licensees down their services or went out of
business in the past six months, often on very short notice, putting us in
serious jeopardy.  More on that next.


Contributions
-------------

As I mentioned above, we have lost several data licensing customers over the
past six months.  This has put us in an extremely tight cash situation.  We
are pounding the pavement hard to try and drum up new licensing customers,
but at this point we need other sources of revenue.  The entire banner ad
sector seems to be taking a beating, so unless a lot of Mojam/Musi-Cal users
start purchasing ads or Burst! Media (our current ad broker) really starts
to come through for us, that's not likely to be a very large revenue source.
We have mulled over the idea of adding "premium" services to our web sites
and charging for them on a subscription basis, but have always rejected that
approach for one reason or another.

We have always thought our services were valuable to our users, but we have
such a diverse base of users including listeners, individual musicians,
booking agents and record labels that we felt that we couldn't come up with
a reasonable subscription model.  Instead, we've decided to try something
like a public radio model.  We have placed sponsorship pages on both Mojam
and Musi-Cal.  They can be reached by clicking any of the PayPal links on
the sites.  From the sponsorship page you can send in a donation of your
choosing via PayPal or check.  You decide what the service is worth to you.


Database Changes
----------------

In August we cut over to a new database.  It took longer than I had
anticipated for things to stabilize after the change.  We also took a big
performance hit as a result.  It's only been in the past few weeks that I've
been happy that the performance is more or less reasonable, and it took
quite a bit of fiddling and bug fixing to get this far.

We are adding a venue address field to the submission forms.  If you submit
a concert listing and include an address for the venue, we will
automatically supplement the corresponding venue database entry with the
address you provided if we didn't already have an address for that venue.
The Musi-Cal submission forms have been updated.  The Mojam submission form
still has to be modified.


Ratings
-------

Mojam website users have been able to rate individual performers for quite
awhile.  We just added this feature to Musi-Cal.  On each search results
page you will see a Performer Ratings section at the bottom of the Notes
Index.  Listed are the ratings of each artist listed on that page's results
(or "n/r" if we have no rating data for an artist) and a series of numbers
(1 to 5) that you can select to rate any performer listed.  As we acquire
more rating data this should help you identify other musicians to go see
based upon the cumulative recommendation of your peers.


Demographic Survey
------------------

We currently farm out most of our banner impressions to Burst! Media.  In
order for them to effectively "sell" us in their campaigns to advertisers,
they say they need their demographic survey filled out by at least 200
people.  As of January 1, just over 100 surveys had been filled out.  It
would help us lean on Burst! if we could blow through that threshold of 200
surveys.  If you could take a few minutes out of your busy day and fill out
the survey at

    http://www.musi-cal.com/survey.shtml

we'd really appreciate it.


Affiliate Program
-----------------

During Y2K we added an affiliate program that I think will be useful to many
people managing websites interested in our content.  You can use our
affiliate links to display concert listings, top 10 performer lists or
solicit concert submissions.  If you are stuck submitting concert schedules
to us and also updating your own page of concert dates, the affiliate
program should prove useful to you.  You can submit dates to us and display
them in tabular form through your website without losing the visitor.  For
more information, check out

    http://www.mojam.com/affl/


Domain Name Switch
------------------

We recently began redirecting traffic from the www.musi-cal.com domain to
the musi-cal.mojam.com domain.  The musi-cal.com URLs continue to work, so
there is no need to change any references you have in web pages or bookmark
files.  As a site hosting banner ads we are evaluated by potential
advertisers in part by our traffic levels.  Having both Musi-Cal and Mojam
operating out of the same second-level domain (mojam.com in this case), will
hopefully make our properties appear as a single unit for traffic
measurement purposes and give us a better shot at more banner ad
opportunities.


Banner Ads
----------

Speaking of which, we have made a couple changes to our online banner ad
signup.  We lowered the cost from $20 to $5 per 1000 impressions, and added
PayPal as a payment option to make it easier for you to pay for your ads.
For anyone that purchases banner ads from us for the first time, we will
also throw in 5,000 extra impressions for free.  The minimum purchase amount
is still just 1,000 impressions, so the minimum cost to get an ad up on our
server is now just $5 and with the bonus impressions can lower the initial
rate to as little as $0.83 per 1,000 impressions.  (Can't beat that with a
stick!)  As always, if you purchase 20,000 or more impressions, you will
receive a 15% discount.

To learn more about purchasing banner ads on the Mojam or Musi-Cal sites,
check out

    http://www.musi-cal.com/cgi-bin/genad



Miscellaneous
-------------

We are always looking for new sources of content.  If you know of any
venues, record labels, bands or promoters who would like to promote their
concerts for free, please tell them to visit the Mojam or Musi-Cal sites.

Finally, let me make you aware of a bug that was reported recently by a
couple users in the Mojam auto notify and Musi-Cal repetitive query
services.  The bug caused those systems to ignore the requested maximum age
of entries in our database when performing searches (typically two weeks),
so they were reporting all entries, not just new ones.  I believe I now have
the bug fixed.  As a result, you should be getting a lot fewer emails from
these systems and what you get should be of more value since it should be
new content.  My apologies for the stupid, stupid bug.  Pardon me while I go
bang my head against the wall...