For more than five years, SongPlanet has been both a dream and concept that has ruled my life (and my wallet). As our tag line says, we're here to help "Indie artists get heard". I set out to do things differently -- SongPlanet has never bombarded artists or listeners with spam or ads, and the live radio has allowed the DJs to separate the good music from, let's just say, the other stuff. I truly believed that if we delivered a consistently good music stream, that listeners, music buyers, and licensing organizations would come calling. Ironically, other sites that did exactly the opposite have grown by leaps and bounds while SongPlanet has barely held its own over that time, despite amazing music from very talented artists.

You can't keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. So over the last 6 months I've spent a lot of money upgrading SongPlanet to provide many of the features that artists expect in 2009. I've spent a lot of time, too.

It's never been my goal to support SongPlanet with artists' money, so I cancelled all the artist subscriptions. Everything has been free *for the artists* since then.

While I still love discovering new music and sharing that with the rest of the world, I am unable to continue to try to meet the high expectations of people who are getting free services. There is so much to which some artists think they are entitled. It's always been a frustration trying to deal with the big picture while having to respond to all of the questions and needs of all of the artists at the same time. Frankly, there are limits on what you can get for free.

There is a lot of work required to make something like this successful, but I'm afraid that it is way more than one person can do, successfully...

There are many people that have supported SP over the years, and I am grateful to have had the chance to know them. And there are new people showing up all the time that are grateful for the opportunity to get their music heard and that is gratifying, but it doesn't help us get more listeners. Without enough listeners, there is really no reason to do this.

WSPR does have actual non-artist listeners - something that most other Indie music sites do NOT have (As I'm sure you know, most OMDs that have Internet Radio stations have only artists from their Web site listening in, particularly if the site allows lobbying to get airplay). Many of our listeners discovered us via the Yahoo widget, and we still get new listeners from this source. Unfortunately, nothing else has helped increase listeners. We started SongPlanet with the belief that artists would direct their fans and friends to the radio stream, but that didn't happen. We understand why -- most artists have their music posted on dozens of sites and no particular allegiance to any one of them.

Over the next few weeks I will be taking all artist pages and songs off of SongPlanet.com, which will now be entirely devoted to the radio stream. All links (from the charts, now playing banners, song history, radio tour, etc.) will lead directly to SongPlanet.net. I will also be discontinuing our Digital Download Sales program. All artists that are owed money will be paid in full in the next few weeks.

SongPlanet.net will essentially become a user-run, self-service music site. Artists may continue to post their songs, photos, blogs, etc. and use the site for their e-business.

While I plan to continue being a DJ, I am also going to return to my "roots" and spend some more time playing my guitar and making music. We'll just have to wait and see what the future holds.

Thank you for your support!
Axe

Some changes you may have noticed:

Every artist that has made the WSPR playlist rotation now has a "WSPR Featured Artist" logo on their artist page. It looks like this and is just to the right of your artist name at the top of your artist page.



I know that there are some things that are still lacking as far as documentation goes, but as we create this new sister site, we're kinda making things up as we go, with a "how does this help Indie artists get heard?" attitude.

Lastly, I'm still getting a lot of "how do I get my songs on WSPR's Web site" questions.

There are two ways.

1. If I like a song, or I think most of the other DJs will like a song, it gets added to the WSPR SongPlanet Radio Web site.

2. If a song is played a certain number of times by a certain number of DJs, it will be added. (this method can take some time to happen)

I usually add songs twice a week (Wednesdays and Fridays), but sometimes (like this weekend), other things come up that require my attention...

More soon!

Thanks!
Axe

by admin
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