We7 has changed!

Great news! As we gear up to our full launch in November, we are making some significant changes on We7. So here is an update on what you can expect over the coming weeks…

Firstly, there will be loads more great music. We are currently signing more labels than ever before, such as EMI, Warner Music, Sony BMG, PIAS, The Orchard, Pinnacle and INgrooves. This means more great music to listen to for free. We are uploading as many as 50,000 tracks a day, with more to come. So keep coming back and see what's new, as we build our "celestial jukebox".

Secondly, we have a great new design. You will see a cleaner, more functional site, making it easier for you to find the music you want. The new search facility is outstanding, and we have added new functionality to make sharing and blogging our music easier. There is also a new persistent music player at the top of each page, which means that as you browse around We7, your music continues to play.

Thirdly, as we shift the focus to free streaming rather than free downloading (at least for now), adverts on downloads will no longer be removable after 28 days. Also, outside the UK, we will be suspending the ability to download free tracks with adverts. There are many reasons as to why we have taken these steps but the main one is simple economics, as we strive to focus upon the UK to build and deliver an outstanding music experience.

Our dream is to eventually give you the choice to stream or download any music you want, for free. The barriers are many, but we are confident that we eventually deliver on our dream, even though it may be in small patient steps.

Fourthly, thanks to you we won the Best Digital Music Service at the 2008 BT Digital Music Awards - just brilliant, thanks for everything and keep telling your friends about us.

And finally, did we mention that there will be MORE MUSIC for you to choose from? So listen to all the music you want free, share it with your friends (legally), and buy what you love in glorious mp3 format!

Cheers,

The We7 team

Comments

[Gareth Reakes, CTO We7]

Hi Hugh H,

You can filter by downloadable content. In the "music" section select "downloadable" from the drop down that starts with "all music". We hope to make this unnecessary over time by making all music downloadable for free with ads. For this to happen we have to show that we can generate the same amount of money for artists and labels as they currently get from paid for downloads. This is one of the things we will be trying to do next year.

[Gareth Reakes, CTO We7]

Hi Zeptepi,

You can still promote We7 as a place to go to stream your music for free (which you will still earn money from) and also buy your music (which again you will earn money from. Buy will also be improving over the next few months). The problem for us is that its not really free. We have an agreement in place to pay you. Outside of the UK we don't have a sales force so it is us that is paying for your fans to download the music instead of the advertisers.

Our traffic has doubled over the last couple of months and the payments have become very expensive. I really do understand where you are coming from. I am one of the founders of the company and it was, and still is, an aim for company to make ad funded downloads work. We are a start-up with limited resources and we think the best way to make that happen is to show it can work in the UK to start with and then expand to other countries.

[Pieter]

This is lame. You're basically degrading yourself from 'interesting new development in music downloads' to 'lame competitor to the streaming music on Last.fm'.

A disappointed visitor from Belgium

[sav]

ciocccccio

[bugmenot2]

I just want to reiterate that there is no way for us to rate tracks or albums with the new interface. Every artist I listen to in the meantime is missing out on getting a popularity boost. Please fix it!

[Neil Young]

This is bad news, you are no longer breaking new ground, and have become just like any other digital music store. Like so many other comments here, unless I receive an email titled Free MP3 Downloads resumed, I have no reason to continue using we7.

I have to question whether ad funded/free tracks could have ever worked, but admittedly a lot of the tracks were old or obscure and the royalties probably very little. I feel that this could have been the intention from the very beginning (I was waiting for the site to go live) and that we7 have effectively built up a customer database under false pretences.

Is there a chance of getting my 20 free credits back so I can download the album that I was waiting for? After all, I have fulfilled my side of the contract by listening to it for 28 days ... ad funded...

Another disgruntled member ... off

[Gareth Reakes, CTO We7]

Hi Sav,

You can rate tracks and albums by using the review functionality. Not many people were using rate and so it ended up being a poor way to sort things by. We now use popularity which is based on how many people listen to it which seems to be more reliable. The review functionality is there if you want to give a bit more in depth rating that other users may be interested in reading.

[Gareth Reakes, CTO We7]

Hi bugmenot2,

The rates for older music are less but they are still significantly higher (many times in fact) the cost of streams of even front line content. Outside of the UK we don't have a sales force to off-set the cost.

It was certainly not our intention from the beginning. Our site did not even support streaming until earlier this year but thats where the music and advertising industries are right now and so we chose to do streaming and strive towards ad-funded downloads. It would also have been an expensive way to make a database. Outside the UK we have had very little advertising revenue so we have been paying for your music!

The site no longer has the functionality to remove the ads (even in the UK) so we can't give them back. I am sorry that you feel disgruntled.

[Rick Montembeault]

I haven't read one positive comment yet. And I'm not gonna be the first. When I first heard about we7 from a TV interview with Mr. Gabriel, it was touted as a way for NEW artists, like myself, to gain exposure and earn money from their music. What a great idea (I thought.)And I joined right away. But every time you've redesigned your site or "upgraded your look" or whatever, you've made it more and more difficult for me (the unsigned artist you are SUPPOSED to be helping) to navigate. Where are my download stats? My review stats? How do I find out how much my songs have earned? Where are the comments left by the "Tastemakers"? What happened to your commitment to finding and promoting new music and artists who are outside of the " mainstream "? Does Pink really need your help more than I do? Do the four major labels, who already control ALL the music we are allowed to hear, really need one more place to promote their CRAP? If Mr. Gabriel was a new artist TODAY, looking/sounding the way he does, he would NEVER have a career! Certainly not with any of the four major labels. I thought the purpose of we7 was to change that ? But now the four major labels who already control everything control YOU TOO.
It comes down to this; as long as the bottom line is profitability and not talent, music and the industry it supports is doomed. Thanks a lot.

[Gareth Reakes, CTO We7]

Hi Rick,

All your download, review, earnings etc stats are accessed from the right column of "Profile" that is linked from the top navigation bar. All comments etc are in that area as well.

We love the idea of tastemaker and we support new artists. Each month we pay many many new artists. In fact, since the new release we now pay more to new artists. While it is true that there is a greater focus on major label content than there was, there is a plan behind this! Its that focus that creates the web site traffic (the number of users that come to the web site). We have many more times the traffic than we did. This means there are more people on the site that can listen to your music.

In the new release we have further promoted the tastemaker. There is now an image and link on every browse page. Browse is used heavily so we hope this will make more people review. In addition we have added new widgets, social book marking and sharing functionality that we hope will allow listeners to share new artists with their friends after they discover you. The single biggest problem with tastemaker at the moment is that not enough people review. Artists pass and fail each week but more artists upload music than review so the queue gets longer and longer. If you have any ideas as to how to fix this then please give me a shout (gareth at we7 dot com).

To reiterate, we are completely committed to new artists. We believe that the way to get you in front of the most people (and therefore pay you the most money) is by getting a large audience to use the website.

We are a business with investors and shareholders. We have to aim to make a profit - if we don't do this then we will eventually go bust and we wont be able to serve major label or new artist music to anyone.

[Zeptepi]

Sorry Gareth, but claiming that you still support new artists is a bit weak. I just logged on and at present all the things you're promoting are the likes of Britney Spears and Craig David, artists hardly in need of the promotion.
As for the claim that more traffic means more people checking out new artists, that's rubbish. More traffic means more people coming to download Britney, these people aren't for a moment going to use we7 to try and discover unsigned artists. Traffic to my band has plummeted since the change, we're lost in a huge crowd of major label artists and nobody will be finding us in a hurry.
I'm sure the move made business sense for we7 and fair play to you guys, but profit is obviously why you're in business and why you've made the change - don't pretend for a moment that you care about anything else because nobody's buying that. Actions speak louder than words...
We7 is now no more than another major label tool.

[Gareth Reakes, CTO We7]

Hi Zeptepi,

I assure you we are still focused on both new artists and unsigned artists. In the forth quarter of the year there is lot of new content from the major record labels so I can understand you think its a bit skewed. To give you a couple of examples of unsigned artists in the last 2 weeks:

This week

Pop Browse Page - Georgia Wonder
R&B Browse Page - Avipaul

Last week

Jazz Browse Page - Jeamie Barton

We have also recently done an interview with Georgia Wonder.

As I have said in a previous post, one of the most significant problems we have is that not enough people are reviewing. This means we are not getting new content through to promote to users. If you have any suggestions as to how we can encourage users to engage more in the tastemaker please shout. Now there is a tastemaker image on every browse page (these are used very heavily) we hope that it will increase the amount reviews and therefore new content.

The new site design also includes a drop down on every browse page that allows users to filter so they can just see new artists so if users want to look at new artist content they can.

As you may have seen, we have just added the first stage of recommendations. This is just the start but one idea is to add not just similar tracks / artists to relevant pages but also similar unsigned tracks / artists. The recommendations functionality is very new so we don't yet have any statistics on how much it used to see whether this will be worthwhile.

The company is of course out to make a profit and I would not suggest otherwise. We are certainly not there yet! I don't think that aiming to make a profit means we can't serve new artists. If we are not here any more then we definitely can't.

If you have any ideas as to how we can better serve new artists or want to suggest anything off line then please feel free to mail me at gareth at we7 dot com.

[Bob Harvey]

Hi
I´m sorry the download idea has had to be suspended. I can see, however, that it was not going to work. At 70p per track that was a lot to make advertisers pay.

Snag is, that means that you are wanting something like UKP16 for a whole album of back-catalogue music like Fairport or Trad Jazz. I can get real, physical, CDs from ebay for prices below UKP 5.

I can see that a 70p track might be fair for new music, and unpublished music. But for back-catalogue tracks that are already out of copyright? If it is the music industry driving the pricing, then they are as crazy and greedy as everyone sazs

[01]

Bah, It was a nice site, now its only a dung.

[Soulsupastarr]

Does, or are We7 planning to license music from Demon Music Group?. They have the European rights to music on the Hi Records label (Al Green etc.), Philadelphia International Records (Teddy Pendergrass, O'Jays, Lou Rawls, Billy Paul etc) and Brunswick (Chi-Lites, Jackie Wilson etc.) which would be, in my opinion, great additions to We7.

[sadf]

So just curious. If you plan to only do streaming, why on earth would we continue coming to we7? Last.fm, pandora, grooveshark and numerous other sites already do this much better. Enable free downloads again and make the advertisements go away after some time. This is the only way you will keep users