We7 gets a facelift!

This week on We7 we’ve a brand new homepage design with some very special new features – all intended to make your free music listening experience even better!

We’re introducing advert-free days, as a reward to our most loyal users.  You’ll see the bar in the top right of the screen, next to the "sign in" link, this will fill up the more you use the site.  When you reach the top you’ve earned 24hrs of advert-free listening!

You can easily share the music of your favourite artists with a simple, new copy and paste code on each artist page.  You can also create your own playlists and share them with your friends – if alot of people listen, it could even make our playlist chart.  Popular playlists are now featured on the new-look homepage.

One of this week’s most popular playlists is our BRIT’s Winners, highlighting all the top tracks from this year’s victors – Duffy, Kings of Leon, Paul Weller, Girls Aloud, Elbow, Katy Perry, Kanye West, Iron Maiden, Florence and the Machine and "Outstanding Contribution to Music" recipients Pet Shop Boys.

Also on We7 we have an Introduction to U2, in anticipation of their forthcoming album release "No Line On The Horizon" – which will be available for streaming for free next Monday.  The intro is a breakdown of the most influential albums which span their 30 years in music, including The Joshua Tree and All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

And finally, announced today is our partnership with legendary music news and features site NME.com.  The NME are using the We7 playlist widget on news stories covering specific artists – so now you can listen to them whilst reading about them!  You can read more on the Guardian Media section.

Have a great week!

The We7 Team

Comments

[gumshoe]

Ordinarily I'd advise any site with a successful layout, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Well.....maybe tweak it when necessary. Now I'm thinking, even though it didn't need mending, you've fixed it! The front page says it all. Now I'm even more of a kid in a sweet shop! Keep it up guys.

[Gareth Reakes, CTO We7]

Hi gumshoe,

Many thanks for the feedback. Its great to know you like the new look.

[Soulsupastarr]

The new We7 design is very good. I can't seem to find the option to check which new albums have been added though!. Before I could go to a musical genre (hip hop for example)and then go through each page to see if any new ad-supported songs/albums have been added. Also, is the download your playlist feature still available?.

Additionally, I think I've asked this before, but will there be any more music from artists who now record for independent labels, like for example, Tony Rich Project's new album 'Exist' be available on We7?. There's lots of music from other genres like hip hop, dance music etc. been added but most of the R&B and Soul music is now no longer downloadable (if I'm correct this was because of a change in music licenses) so having more R&B and Soul music on We7 would be good.

[Lucian Holland, Head of Product Design We7]

Hi Soulsupastarr,

First off, the download playlist feature - thanks for pointing this out, this is actually just a mistake! The button got removed accidentally in the reskin. We'll put it back as soon as we can in the next few weeks.

On the other point, are you talking about the ability to see new downloadable music in a genre? This is still available if you click "More top songs" at the bottom of the music genre pages. This will take you into a full listing view where you can filter things as you used to be able to. Is that what you're looking for?

As far as independent content is concerned, we have quite a big queue of music going up over the next few months now that the content from the majors has been uploaded. This includes a catalogue of 1.5 million downloadable tracks from The Orchard, who distribute many of the independent labels. I can't give you any precise timescales but I can say that getting this new content up on the site is a high priority for us and we're working on it right now!

Thanks for all the feedback!

[kylie]

wat u tink of mi play lis tpepz x

[Soulsupastarr]

Hi,

I have found the option to find downloadble music again and the new music from The Orchard sounds very good too.

[Soulgirl]

Hi We7,
Can we,please, have as soon as possible flash playlist widgets to put on Myspace as they don't accept Javascript embeds.

Also,your javascipt players does not work in Multipy.com nor Wordpress.com. Could you also make compatible widgets for those sites too please!

Cheers!

[Lucian Holland, Head of Product Design We7]

Hi Soulgirl,

We have more widgets planned including one for Myspace. The challenge for us is that all our widgets need to include visual advertising to ensure that the artists get paid. Using javascript we can create a small widget that expands to a large enough size to contain a standard advert when you activate it; a pure flash widget will have to be the full size at all times, which is obviously not quite as user-friendly. But we will definitely be adding this option in the future for those sites that don't support javascript.