Edit: in case you're curious, here's what the dashboard looks like for bloggers - http://i.imgur.com/mJG1LP5.png
While I have no need for SubmitHub's main purpose, the Popular tab looks like it can serve as another source of fresh stuff.
All in all, massive respect for your work promoting new music. As a sidenote, I'd happily donate some money through Patreon/whatever to support an ad-free version of the site (I know, I know, one in a million :).
To me it seems like expanding on the playable features could make SubmitHub itself a very meta/cool place to submit through. A place to engage other artists. It's like HackerNews for music.
If you visit the "directory of blogs" page, you'll see a full selection of the filters: http://www.submithub.com/blogs
Here's what I like about the very small flat fee:
1. It is small enough for even modestly successful musicians to cover it. It isn't a monetary barrier to entry.
2. It is likely large enough to prevent the shotgun approach. This is one of the bigger problems of finding new talent for record labels and music writers, especially in the digital age when emailing or messaging someone a link to your song approaches zero cost...you can't realistically listen to every unsolicited track, so you have to filter somehow. This, at least, insures you don't get a bunch of stuff in genres you don't care about or know anything about. People have to choose a little more carefully.
3. It provides an incentive for writers and musicians to form a relationship so they'll work together again (with the blogger getting tipped again and the artist getting more coverage or useful feedback); it starts out as a monetary transaction, but once they've connected up and like each other, they could work toward building a scene (and the network that comes with that). In music, a scene is a force multiplier for everyone involved (e.g., Seattle grunge, Madchester, Atlanta dirty south).
Increasing the fee for big sites looks more like payola than merely a filtering tool to determine who has gone to the trouble to figure out the best handful of writers or labels to reach out to. If the profit of the site begins to come from the musicians they're reviewing, their incentives start to get lopsided in the wrong direction. I'm not saying all bloggers would do it, but there would be incentive to boost stats (with clickbaity stuff), and to get as many submissions as possible. Incentives should, IMHO, be directed toward increasing quality, maximizing the time a writer can spend on the artists they choose to cover, and providing the best feedback for the artists.
Anything that gives incentive to cheat the system will break it and reduce the quality of the network...likely even killing it. If there's even a slight notion that people are scamming musicians with this, it will (maybe deservedly) die.
To build on that, for most of these blogs this is the first time they're earning any mentionable revenue from running their websites. Not only is it making their lives easier -- it's actually rewarding them for their passion yada yada.
So, you monetized websites that previously weren't with product their users will enjoy. Sounds like a nice design pattern for bootstrapping businesses on non-profit organizations or sites. One to remembet. I especially like you keep it win/win.
Ahhh, thanks. I was wondering how you were doing a service with a $1 charge (I didn't see the $5 minimum mentioned in the portion of the article I read).
I wish the Chrome app was better, or if it had a standalone client wrapped in Electron or something.
Thanks!
The stack is something along the lines of: nginx + docker + Meteor (node/mongodb) + React.
I'm pretty sure Jason uses Mupx for deployment to DigitalOcean (https://github.com/arunoda/meteor-up/tree/mupx).
For anyone interested, this package makes it super easy to setup all the tools and deploy to the servers (almost as easy as pushing to Heroku!).
I've had good experience in scaling using Mupx and Cluster (another package from the same team - https://github.com/meteorhacks/cluster)