Onesheet wins Best Bootstrapped Music Startup at SXSW
Happy to announce that Onesheet has been awarded Best Bootstrapped Music Startup in the SXSW Accelerator! This comes a day after our enormous Onesheet Mobile launch on Tuesday.
Thanks to our community for getting us this far! We still have a lot to do, but it’s always nice to get a little recognition of a job well done so far. :)
Onesheet Mobile has arrived!
Tens of thousands of entertainment professionals have built beautiful web presences using Onesheet. These gorgeous sites have been visited millions of times. But there’s always been a missing piece: mobile.
While Onesheet looks great on large screens, the mobile experience has been less than ideal. That changes today.
We are rolling out the pilot program for Onesheet Mobile. We’ve redesigned the Onesheet experience when visited from a mobile device to be much smoother and fit for a smaller screen.
Onesheet Mobile automatically generates a beautiful, branded mobile web app. There is no additional work to do, no app to download. Everyone who visits your Onesheet on mobile will see it.
If a fan saves your page to their home screen, it creates a mobile icon with your image, and when they launch the app, their screen is filled with your background image as the app loads. It’s gorgeous.
Of course there are challenges when moving to mobile. Some of the widgets users have integrated won’t work on a mobile device because of their size or they use Flash. Those will be greyed out on the mobile view. We are working with these partners to provide content in a mobile friendly way, and hopefully will be switching these over in the upcoming months.
Also, there are a lot of mobile devices. We want Onesheet Mobile to be rock solid with all of them, but this will take time. However, we are confident that Onesheet Mobile will look better than Onesheet overall, regardless of the device.
Onesheet Mobile is a premium feature offered as part of our premium Pro package. But the Pro price stays the same. Still under $5/month.
However, during our pilot, we have enabled every single Onesheet to be mobile friendly through the month of March! We’re especially excited to do this during SXSW, when many fans will be accessing Onesheets on their phones to find out more about bands they are hearing about.
So go check it out! Visit your Onesheet from a mobile device and send us feedback. Remember, this is just a pilot program. There will be bugs. We have a lot to learn, but can’t wait to keep refining this experience to make it the best it can be!
We just added SoundCloud’s Email Unlock
Just the other day, SoundCloud Labs released Email Unlock, a simple way to collect email addresses for media. Onesheet is a big supporter of SoundCloud and believes that building your email list is integral for long term success, so we wanted to support this new initiative as soon as we could.
Starting today, you can add your new SoundCloud Email Unlock widget to your Onesheet. All you need is your Email Unlock URL and about 3 seconds. You can find the widget available in your settings bar right now!
Custom Domains are Finally Here!
Last year, we released the basic version of our custom domain product. It enabled users to forward their domain to their Onesheet page and “mask” the URL. The solution wasn’t ideal, but it worked for the past few months.
Today, we are thrilled to officially announce full support for custom domains! The way we had it before, there were a lot of issues, including missing data when sharing to Facebook and not optimizing your page URL for Google search.
The new version we are releasing today solves all of those problems. And it’s free for everyone.
We really encourage you to set your Onesheet up with you own domain either by using it as your website (http:// yourname.com) or adding a subdomain to your website (http:// onesheet.yourname.com). Both of these will do wonders for your Onesheet’s placement on Google.
To set up your Onesheet to have a custom domain, read the instructions here!
What a Week! The Grammy Awards and Starting at Onesheet
As I begin this first tumbl, I wanted to introduce myself and touch on a few of my interests, one of which had its most important weekend of the year- The Grammy Awards. I am a music lover (yes, even Country), a technology junkie, and big sports fan- mainly The Saints, all things LSU, The Lakers, and Dodgers. I grew up in New Orleans and then moved to Southern California which explains my sports team affiliations. On a professional note, I just joined Onesheet.com in the last week, overseeing Marketing and Business Development. However, calling it work is a stretch as I get to work with great people and combine two of my favorite things- technology and music- and on top of that, we figure out ways to help bands improve and manage their web presence. While I work WITH a great team at Onesheet, I work FOR my dog, Louie, who’s picture you can find on here with plenty to come. I also manage a great band from San Francisco called The Family Crest, who you can check out here (http://onesheet.com/TheFamilyCrest/#).
This was a roller coaster weekend for myself and all music lovers, with The Grammy Awards and the unfortunate passing of Whitney Houston. The big winner on Sunday night was Adele, who won all six of the categories she was nominated for and all the major awards in her genre. Some other great stories on Sunday night were Skrillex who managed to take home three awards and Bon Iver who took home two awards, one of which was Best New Artist despite irritation from some as he released his first album years ago.
Of course, the night was overshadowed in some ways by the passing of Whitney on Saturday night. While her musical career is second to none and all of her #1’s speak for themselves, she held a special place in my musical heart as she was the first artist I ever saw perform live when I was about five years old living in New Orleans. So in all it was quite a week for me personally and professionally…and for music fans all over the world. I can’t wait to see what the rest of 2012 holds in store for all of us!
Talk soon,
Jim
