The World Around Records Website Drops Today

Posted by Justin Boland on Oct 13, 2009 | 0 Comments

I have awesome news: we’ve finally launched the World Around Records website. This is a quick rundown of the features and goals, plus three questions I’ve got about the site.  Your answers are hugely and greatly appreciated.

The site’s main goal is converting traffic to downloads.  Considering most albums in the catalog are free downloads, that should be a reasonable enough goal.  Any conversation about how World Around is going to make money is beside the point with the metrics we’ve got now-the priority for 2009 is getting more listeners, hundreds of thousands more listeners.

Right now, we’re also featuring our newest release, We Have the Technology, a full-length album from the Madison, Wisconsin live hip hop band known as dumate. 

Each album page has a media player built into the tracklist. Just click on the title of any given song and the site will play the rest of the album while for you.  We’ve already gotten some feedback that this wasn’t clear enough, so we’ll be tweaking the player to be more obviously functional to users.  The core metrics we’re looking for are very simple at this phase: we want to be increasing listeners every month.

With that in mind, we’ve built the entire site to aim users towards the music.  That’s the purpose behind the album slider menu, which is embedded onto everything on the site (except our very cool search page).

My Questions

1. Is everything obvious? We’re not trying to make an interactive puzzle game, we want people to play the music, dig what they hear, and then download that music, too.  Do the album pages make intuitive sense to y’all?

2. How is the sound? For streaming, we’re trying to balance speed and quality-I’d like to know if it sounds good enough to be listenable while you’re working.

…and finally…

3. What features do you expect to see, but don’t?