Hi everyone, it only took 2 months since promising it at the inaugural town hall but we finally have a forum up and running.
You should be able to log in with your regular Minm accounts: let us know if you’re having difficulties.
A big part of what we’d like Minm to do differently is to be as transparent and community driven as possible. We think the forum would be a good way to achieve this: a central place for everyone to voice their thoughts, as well as for us to update you on what we’re working on.
And speaking of which, @daniel and I have been hard at work ironing things out, so once again thanks for your patience. The main highlights this February were mostly related to bug squashing and improving the terms of use and about pages.
We also flicked on the switch for lossless streaming: we were already re-encoding your lossless files into flac, so it was just a matter of giving the player an option to stream the files.
And the first wave of distributions have gone out too! Things seem to have gone smoothly. We redesigned the invoice page to give a clearer breakdown of where your money was going.
Hopefully artists will have started to have seen some payments to their bank accounts. If you haven’t seen anything yet, there’s a minimum transfer of €1, which is a technical limitation from Stripe. (We might need to move the payout processor away from Stripe later due to fees: I’ll update you on this soon)
We’ve also carried out a few interviews with some radio stations and magazines which has been fun, thanks to everyone for reaching out. And as always we like to use the air time to promote some of the music on Minm when we can.
Contributing writers
One of the ways that we like to promote music is through the features on the website itself. And there’s lots of upcoming music that we’d love to cover, so we’re looking for contributing writers to help us conduct interviews and write short articles! We have a small budget for this, so if you’re interested please get in touch with either Daniel or myself.
Apps
This is where we’re spending 90% of our time these days: We’re aware the web player is pretty spartan, but as was discussed at the town hall, the apps are taking priority since it’s near impossible to make a decent audio player for your phone with just a website. We’re on track to have minimal Android and iOS apps done by spring (or at least ready to beta test!), and by minimal we mean standard playback controls, accessing your library and basic search/explore functionality.
A lot of the work on this so far has been laying out technical architecture for the apps, and as a part of it we have a new GraphQL framework for SwiftUI we’ve been developing that we plan on open sourcing soon.
Growth
Daniel and I have been overwhelmed with the support so far these first couple of months, from both artists and listeners alike. The number of subscribers and artists is growing pretty steadily, and I’d love to share some numbers soon, once we wrap our heads around the financials. We think it’s a promising sign that with some branding and marketing, we’ll be able to get the growth needed to make Minm sustainable in the long-term. But the plan for now is to get these apps out of the way first so we have the bare minimums covered before doing any sort of campaign or drive.
Anyway, we’ll probably have a town hall closer to the app’s launch date. Back to work on the apps for now. Will have another update soon.
