Cherrypeel.com is giving away 2 PIP Passes to this weekend's Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, TX.

As you may have heard, PIP's are completely sold out so this is your last chance to get the Holy Grail of tickets.These tickets will get you premier access, exclusive viewing terraces, cold beer, tasty grub, PIP gifts and more!

Contest Rules:

The contest will be judged on activity within the site. Be it new music you upload as a band/artist, playlist you've created, comments you've made on songs and votes you have casted to support your favorite artist. The more votes for your music, your playlist, comments you've made and songs you've voted on, the more points you score and the closer you are to the grand prize. Our Guru site developer will capture all the data and we will announce the winner late on Friday.

Good Luck!

A change in ownership of the Cherrypeel website is taking place, although the original ideals will remain the same.

The new owner, Bo Claypool, lives in Austin, Texas which is the absolute epicenter for Indie Music and home to the world famous SXSW and Austin City Limits music festivals.

Bo has stated he is interested in expanding organically through the inevitable buzz created by showcasing quality, original music.

Please help me welcome Bo to the Cherrypeel community.

Thanks for your interest and let me know at andrew@cherrypeel.com if you have any questions.

The time has come to make a tough decision for the Cherrypeel developers. Cherrypeel has been part of our lives for the better part of two years but at this time, other business projects and family commitments have led us to the decision to sell Cherrypeel.

Cherrypeel was launched June 13th 2008 in a private beta and launched publically Oct 22nd 2008. Since then we have generated monthly uniques of up to 75,500, a community of 7,000 listeners and 1,500 artists.

We believe there is a great potential for growth given the right attention and promotion to music fans. Everything has been set up to take that next step.

What is up for sale?

• The domain name cherrypeel.com
• All software written (in Java, no Reddit source code was used) to run and maintain Cherrypeel, including our Facebook application, embeddable HTML player, images etc.
• Our registered user base of 7,000 listeners and 1,500 artists
  We have a very strong demographic of users that advertisers desire to contact:
  • Age: 95% of users are between 18-30; Average & Median age 23
  • Sex: 73% male - 27% female
  • Location: 60% USA; 18% Canada; 5% UK; 3% Australia; 14% Other

Cherrypeel Stats:

• Our traffic currently is at 6,000 monthly uniques. Including peaks from press we have hit up to 75,500 monthly visitors.
• 4.23% bounce rate, an average of 5 page views and 8 minutes on the site per visit.
• We are working with DC101, from Washington DC, to produce a weekly radio show where Cherrypeel users get to select the music they want to hear each Sunday night.
• Cherrypeel currently runs on two small instances at Amazon Web Services and we have written the software to be very scalable.
• We have yet to focus on revenue generation, so little revenue numbers are available.

Based on the response to this announcement, we plan to auction off the site online.

Please email me at andrew@cherrypeel.com with further questions, requests for analytics, offers or to be put on a mailing list to be informed of when and where we are holding the online auction.

Over the past few days Cherrypeel has gotten quite a bit of attention from various social websites and a reoccurring theme in the comments were our lack of depth in certain genres. Unfortunately for us this is an accurate critique.

When we started Cherrypeel, we got the word out to our friends and the bands we like, so the site has since taken on a similar vibe to that of our iTunes libraries. We want Cherrypeel to reflect the tastes of a large group of people and for that we require each genre to be packed with good songs. Using the genre filter, people with disparate tastes in music can happily share the same website.

So how are we going to fill these genres with good songs? We are asking you to upload your band, to ask your friend to upload theirs, ask your favorite band to get aboard Cherrypeel or just shout from rooftops and hopefully someone with a good band will hear you. We are doing our best to begin to fill these genres but who better to help us than the people closest to these worlds? The fans and the music makers!

Get in touch with us if you have anything to say on this topic,
The Cherrypeel Team,
feedback@cherrypeel.com

If you’ve read our philosophy you know that we here at Cherrypeel believe digital technology has changed the music business forever. We see the need for recording financing and access to traditional distribution networks diminishing. One thing that hasn’t changed is that artists still need to be paid for their craft; they need to put food on the table and buy the luxuries everyone else can afford. The romantic idea of a ‘starving artist’ isn’t nearly as romantic when it becomes a reality. So what is the future of making money out of music that is given away for free almost everywhere?

According to Michael Masnick from Techdirt, it is connecting with you fans and then giving them a reason to buy or as he puts it; CwF * RtB = $$$. That sounds simple enough. Cherrypeel is well positioned to help bands and fans connect. There aren’t too many communities online where if you comment on a song you can be fairly certain to either get a response or at least know the artist read it.

I encourage all artists on Cherrypeel to reach out to their fans and make that connection and then figure out what you can offer them above just your tracks. Is it a T-shirt or a box set or dinner with you and your family? And let us know about any successes… or failures, you encounter along the way.

Andrew
andrew@cherrypeel.com

Is it based on talent? Is it based on luck? According to this fantastic article by the New York Times, it is much more of the latter.

The experiment mentioned in the article is very similar to what we do here at Cherrypeel. But unlike the real world, bands’ positions on our charts are often reset giving them another shot at getting the spotlight if it didn’t go well the first time. The other benefit to removing bands from the top spot is that it prevents them from having run away fame, making them continue to work for their fans based on the quality of their music. Another finding from the experiment was that the success of each artist is heavily affected by early voters, so get over to the new page and start choosing the songs you want the community to hear.

Get voting!
Andrew
andrew@cherrypeel.com

We’ve started a poll on Reddit to choose which artist will receive an upcoming Featured Artist spot. We have seeded the poll with three artists, Elephant Gun, Admiral Twin & Emilie Mover. You are welcome to add other artists by submitting there link as a parent comment on the reddit story.

Whichever parent comment has the highest score when the story reaches 72 hours will receive the spot within a week.

So that’s it, goto (http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/7p4vp/help_cherrypeel_select_an_upcoming_featured/) and vote for or submit a Cherrypeel artist you want to see at Cherrypeel’s Featured Artist.

Happy voting,
The Cherrypeel Team
feedback@cherrypeel.com

We’ve launched our ‘stalker’ player so you never need to scroll to the top of the page again to fiddle with your playlist. With the precious seconds we have saved you, you can now spend more time voting, commenting and sharing the love over Cherrypeel.

Bam!
The Cherrypeel Team
feedback@cherrypeel.com

Due to user feedback we’ve created a new forum to encourage more… user feedback.

You can get to the forum by clicking our feedback button on our footer or directly here: cherrypeel.uservoice.com. Uservoice is a pretty cool concept and much like our site you can vote on peoples’ suggestions or submit your own. Let us know what you think of this service and if we should stick with it.

We’ve seeded it with some of our ideas for the future and are looking for your thoughts. I can promise I’ll read all feedback we receive but it might take some time for us to get it implemented, as we are tight on time and resources.

We are planning a large-scale redesign of the user interface including a mini-feed to see what is going on with your friends and favorite artists, more pictures of you and the bands, simplified navigation and more music. Please let us know your ideas before we get too far into the design so they can be included.

Talk to you soon,
The Cherrypeel Team
feedback@cherrypeel.com

Due to popular demand, the Cherrypeel player now has shuffle and repeat functionality. Enjoy!

What else is new? To improve the layout of the site we have updated the footer with more glorious features. This is now where you can find our Facebook app, FAQ, RSS feed, this blog and our feedback window. An About Us page will soon find its home there, shining some light on who is behind the wonder of Cherrypeel.

That’s it for now,
The Cherrypeel Team
feedback@cherrypeel.com

We’ve been working hard to knock off a whole bunch of items on our list of to-do’s.

Here’s what we’ve completed:
-We’ve created several tools (Facebook application, email contact importer & updated banners) to help artists drum up votes and listeners share their favorite songs. As an honest and unbiased observer, I can tell you our Facebook app is the best one out there... by far. Seriously. Find out for yourself by following the link on the top right of the page or as an artist on your ‘Promote’ page.
-Songs are now available for purchase through iTunes. If you are an artist and want to start selling your songs, goto your song management page and select the iTunes option.
-The genre filter has been improved to more accurately select the genres you want. To do this we now only allow one genre per song. If you want to change your song’s genre you can do this on the song management page under ‘edit song information’.
-Our autopublishing system (link to previous post) is now fully operational, so artists will be receiving emails informing them when a song has been published.
-An RSS feed that will display either the top 15 popular, newest or top songs as well as a feed for the Featured Artist. Subscribe by clicking the button beside the page title you want.

What’s next?:
-Cherrypeel will be creating our very own podcast.
-An HTML player similar to our amazing Facebook app.

Cheers,
The Cherrypeel Team
feedback@cherrypeel.com