General Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

It is for the time being. Free websites aren't sustainable forever. Eventually there could be so much traffic that I will need an income from FanConcert to pay hosting costs. I'm working on FanConcert full time, so I would also like to make a modest salary for the time I'm taking to add new features for users to enjoy. I don't plan to become rich from this endeavor but I would like to be able to support myself.

Income could be provided through banner advertising or by soliciting donations (like Wikipedia) but neither option is particularly appealing to me or (from feedback I've received) my users for various reasons.

What I would rather do is offer FanConcert for free with a few tagged artists or "Favourites" as an unlimited free trial. If users want to maintain larger lists of tagged artists then I will ask them to pay for a subscription based on the number of tagged artists they want to have. The logic being that the more tagged artists a user has, the more FanConcert resources they are using to have their news delivered to them. Free users would still see banner advertising (Google's AdSense) to cover their cost and paying users would not see any advertising.

People will also be able to browse FanConcert without logging in at all in order to read news. These "anonymous" users will not be able to tag artists or use custom news pages or RSS feeds. Anonymous use will be paid by displayed AdSense banner advertising.

The cost to subscription users will be small and reasonable. Users can consider it an investment in the present and future health of FanConcert to ensure that it is always available as a resource. How FanConcert can survive financially is still up for debate and I would like very much to hear your comments. The best place is on the FanConcert mailing list.

Of course! FanConcert's only marketing in the short term is word-of-mouth and weblogs. This is an intentional (non-)effort to keep FanConcert's growth rate manageable. In the unlikely event that FanConcert grows too quickly, I may have to limit the number of new accounts so that the service stays responsive for existing members, especially paying subscribers who will naturally have priority over anonymous or trial users.

Please keep in mind that FanConcert is far from fully functional and it will be in constant development over the coming weeks, with new features added daily. See the question Is FanConcert in "beta"? below. Check FanConcert often to see the new features or join the FanConcert mailing list for regular announcements.

I definitely welcome feedback and criticism on weblogs. I'll be checking the referrer logs and Technorati to keep on top of this communication channel. In fact, here's the Technorati page for FanConcert.

Great, we love feedback! You can use the Contact Us page or join the mailing list.

Because you haven't added it yet. :) You can easily add that artist You could also add some of your favourite artist's upcoming concerts and releases.

FanConcert's motto is Music news by fans for fans, meaning users submit news for other users to read. In this way, FanConcert is a large, collaborative, organized and customizable link weblog devoted to music news.

In the strict technical sense of the word, yes it is. I don't like to use that term because it has become diluted and means different things to different people. Google's Gmail for example has been used by several million users in "beta" for quite some time.

I prefer to say that FanConcert is alive. It's living and breathing but it's also constantly growing and changing. New features and bug fixes will always be happening. People will always be testing, poking and prodding FanConcert to try to break it. I encourage rigorous testing and criticism because that's how software stays alive/healthy and how users stay happy.

People like seeing their feedback quickly lead to changes on the website. Having an informal policy of constant evolution facilitates change, rather than staying in one place because it's safer and eventually stagnating.

For the pedantic, FanConcert will always be in "beta" but it's intentional. I don't want this to imply we do not strive for high quality, we definitely do. FanConcert has a significant unit and functional test suite and many informal manual testers. Mistakes happen in software development, that's the nature of the game. The best we can do is pay attention to our users and have a quick and lightweight process for responding to defects. On FanConcert bugs will be corrected as quickly as possible as soon as we know about them.