Monthly Archives: May 2014

Lovur – first update

Now the Lovur application has been available for a couple of weeks and it currently has over 100 installs.
It’s unsurprisingly not a very popular application (people download it, test it and forget about it) but it seems to mostly work, except for a few crashes..

CrashesNow, this is a very neat feature in the Play Store. I get the crash and the stack trace! No problem to debug and fix 🙂

(in this case I was apparently using a function that doesn’t exist before Android 3.0)

 

 

Using the spotify widget

Assuming things can be a bit risky.

I was delighted when I found these Spotify widgets that I could embed on my pages for promoting my music.



..and for those that have a Spotify subscription this is good. But not really for the rest of the world.

I was finding that I was getting quite alot of traffic to on of my pages that had a Spotify widget at the top but there was no increase showing in the statistics on Spotify. After a quick check of my page using another computer than usual I understood why.

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Even though the widget looks like it can play the song, it can only do that if you’re logged into Spotify. If the play button is clicked the user is asked to log in (and most people won’t bother).

I’ve now moved the Spotify widgets further down on the pages and have SoundCloud ones at the top instead. That is much more effective as it requires no sign in.

 

Ads with AdWords and Facebook

I’ve been experimenting with online ads using both Google AdWords and AdMob as well as Facebook ads for the last week.

Now, to begin with, the comparison will not be completely fair, as Google was running a campaign that gave me a coupon of 750 SEK (the very nice support at AdWords arranged that for me when I asked if I could be eligible for their ongoing campaign) while there was no such campaign on Facebook and thus my budget for testing there was significantly smaller than on the Google services. I have yet to find a similar possibility on Facebook to get started.

Anyway, I think I might have some preliminary findings that are of interest.

Lovur adFirstly, Advertising an application with AdMob has been quite effective. Even at low daily budget of 20 SEK/day it was effective. Weekends were especially good.

Advertizing music using Googles AdWords ads was however not as successful. The Ads got the clicks and thus visits to the sverrirv.com page of the tracks, but very few people stayed on the page to listen, and then only using the SoundCloud links (not Spotify). In fact, my Google Analytics data indicates that most people that got drawn in to the pages via ads didn’t stay on the page at all (0 seconds).  I guess that means they clicked the ads by mistake in most cases.

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Facebook was just as unsuccessful as AdWords when it came to getting people to play the Spotify music. I guess that has to do with the requirement to have a Spotify account and that many people don’t have that. Facebook was however quite good at getting plays of the SoundCloud links. That’s reasonable as the music can be listened to directly in Facebook, not requiring the user to do anything at all other than listening.

My conclusion from this is that I will do my next experiment on Facebook with music and perhaps do another drive for my application using Google AdMob. I’m not getting people to listen to my songs by using AdWord at the moment (not necceseraly a fault of adwords. Can just as well be my website design that drives people away).

Surprising spread of the Lovur app

I’m truly surprised I have to admit. The Lovur app has seen qSpreaduite some spread.

Of course, it’s due to that I have been experimenting a little bit with ads with Google AdWords but I never thought it would get this kind of spreading and that users would return!

The ads have focused on US, UK and India but there is some spread also except for those countries and it’s increasing every day.  Do the ads run in other countries than I’ve selected? I don’t know..

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Anyway. The appimagelication is not a hit by any means, but it’s got a lot more than the expected 0 users, and the users are well spread and some are returning. Quite satisfying for a few hours of learning HTML5 I must say.

 

Using AdWords to promote music

My music is a hobby. I’m lucky enough to have a good job that I really like and I don’t have to depend on my music to put food on the table (it would not be a lot of food…).  But, it would be very interesting to know if I could make any real money of it.

To do that I need listeners, and that means that I need people to know that I exist, or at least that my music exists. So I am doing a very small experiment using AdWords to promote one of my songs. The ad

I chose the song Smygehamn , as it is linked to a place, and the place is quite popular during the summer months for tourists.

So the question I’m trying to answer is if the ad actually manages to drive any traffic to the homepage of the song, and also if it leads to any purchase or streaming plays.

Time will tell, and I will write again here in a while about how this has turned out.

 

What effect did tagging a song have?

Now a short time has passed since I posted about tagging on SoundCloud and I thought a small update might be of interest.

The effect has been noticeable. The song in question had been all but forgotten before I added the tags but is now on my top list of most played songs without me having driven it in any way. Now that increase may be an effect of me writing about the song in a previous blog post and I have to check with other songs just to see if the results stays.

Happy tagging.. it seems to matter.

Why Firefox is my prefered browser

I use a few browsers on my different desktops and I normally don’t really care what I’m using. The standard is pretty high when it comes to browsers and even the bad ones are good. But there is a browser I always get back to, and that is Firefox.

Although writing this little post about it gave me an opportunity to tweet  Tweet about Firefox crashingthat Firefox crashed a lot today, I won’t mind. It usually doesn’t (and has just had a major upgrade).

But the main reason is that it is cross platform, and that the plugins are just so good (Pocket and Evernote mostly).

I don’t use many plugins, but those I have integrate well (on all platforms I use) and the browser does actually feel faster on my mac than Chrome. Then the fact that it’s very developer friendly is a big plus.

But the main reason is the fuzzy feeling of control and trust. Mozilla isn’t selling my data, and they work actively to make the web a little bit more secure.
That really matters.

 

Effects of tagging on soundcloud

I’m doing a small experiment here. I normally don’t tag that much on my songs on SoundCloud. Basically, I’m too lazy. But what effect would it have if I did?
Time to find out.

I selected a song that’s not being played a lot, even though I would say it’s quite good: Reading.

The song only has a few tags as shown in the picture below. Now what happens if I add a bunch of tags?

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As the song is about Reading between the lines there are all sorts of tags I can add to it. So here is what I ended up with.

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The limit is 30 tags and all are used now. It will be interesting to see if tagging has any effect in the plays the song gets (and the fact that most of the tags are on what the song is about, not the style of music).