Hey, everyone! We've been on a little hiatus due to moving to Seattle for the summer. We're back now. However, we need help from the community. At the moment we're stuck at a crossroads with respect to which direction we want to take indiradio.

Considering recent changes in the music industry and the proliferation of similar sites, there are many directions we can go with this site. I've composed a small survey with some questions. If you have a moment, please answer as few or as many as you wish and submit them to info@myindiradio.com. We appreciate any help that you can give us and your generosity will not be forgotten.

1. What sites do you use that are music related? (i.e. MySpace, PureVolume, Last.fm)

2. What do you like about indiradio? (i.e. features, atmosphere, design, layout)

3. What don't you like about indiradio? (this is actually more useful for us, so please be honest)

4. What do you use indiradio mostly for? (i.e. posting music, posting gig information, finding new artists)

5. In what ways do you promote yourself as a musician, or in what ways do you discover new music?

Thanks!

- Mike

co-founder of indiradio

The ASU student paper did a story on us! We're in the news! Help us get exposure by Digging this story.

We've been busy lately. The site might look totally different, but we promise it's still the indiradio you know and love. Just so nobody gets too confused, here's an overview of what we've changed:

• Song browsing: we changed the way browsing for songs works, so it's much easier to find the exact artist or album you're looking for. You can browse by artist, album, genre, and location, and even have songs recommended to you.
• Buddylists: we changed the way buddies get displayed, so it's way more attractive now, filled with all of those buddy icons we know you like to stare at for hours. We also changed the way buddying works: you now have to request approval in order to become someone's buddy. You'll get an email asking you for approval if someone says they're your friend. We've heard this sort of thing is good for privacy. Also, you can now have friends recommended to you, much like songs--they might be artists you'd like to listen to, or listeners that you probably have something in common with.
• The site theme! We got sick of the dreary grey on black motif we were using, so we decided to take a stand against the lack of color. It worked. We hope that this new color scheme is a lot easier on the eyes (and less depressing, too).

We also added a few entirely new features! They are:

• Favorites: click on "add to favorites" at the bottom links section of any song, gig, profile, or page on the site to save that page to your favorites. Your favorites are visible on your profile and are a way to let others know what content you like. You can also use them to save pages you frequently visit, and get to them through your profile.
• Listener profiles: we thought it just wasn't fair that artists got these way cool designer profiles with all sorts of borders and fancy features, and listeners had crappy profiles with no real organization or layout... so we fixed it. Listeners have fancy profiles now. See what they can do! You might be in for a surprise or two.

I noticed today that sometimes people type out URLs in blog entries and the like. As of two days ago, you'd have to manually link that using an HTML link tag. It's nice to have those URLs automatically turn into links... so now they do! It's the little details that make a site feel like home... and it's my job to make this site feel as much like home as possible. I spend about 6 hours a day here, myself, so it's just as important to me as it is to all of you. :)

The indiradio site blog now has an rss feed! You can use it to syndicate our site blog on your own feed reader or news site. As always, users' blogs continue to have RSS feeds of their own. They can be accessed with the link at the bottom of the page that looks like this: .

We're redesigning song browsing. It's nowhere near done yet, but hopefully it's going to be a lot more useful than what we have now. The goal is to make songs way easier to find than before. We have (tentatively) planned on using a tabbed page structure, with the default way of browsing being newest-first. Other likely tabs are "by artist", "by genre", "by location", and "random". Do you guys have any other suggestions on how you'd like to browse our site? No idea is too far-fetched... around here, we like crazy.