Case Study: The Subways on bln.kr

Here is a photo of that shows The Subways (@thesubways) Twitter follower count over time.  Look at the spikes around 11/03 and 11/23.  I’ve circled them in green.

These are the days when The Subways uploaded songs to http://bln.kr.  The songs were quite popular and spread quickly through Facebook and Twitter.  Pretty cool, huh?

Here are the first two songs:

Make It Wit Chu (Acoustic Cover) - http://bln.kr/4E3

In for the Kill (Acoustic Cover) - http://bln.kr/4U8

You can view all songs by The Subways here: http://bln.kr/-thesubways

Redesign Coming

Very shortly we will be rolling out a redesigned layout that focuses on simplicity, ease of use, and a clean presentation. We are making a deliberate effort to stay out of the way and let the artist’s personality shine through.

But it is always a balance. MySpace gave artists a great deal of control over their page layouts, but the number one complaint I hear over and over from listeners and artists is that MySpace is at best inconsistent and at worst, junky.

Contrast with Facebook, which I think forces artists into too narrow of a box. Facebook pages are devoid of personality or visual impact, which I believe is crucially important in presenting yourself and your art.

Today, we automatically import an artist’s Twitter background image and Twitter/Facebook profile pic when they log into bln.kr.

As we build out our premium feature set, we are interested in more ways to provide a professional, consistent way to customize bln.kr.

What customizing options would you like to see from us?

QR Codes

So we enabled QR codes, which are a form of barcode, on the desktop and mobile versions of bln.kr.

For me, this is more of an experiment than anything. We believe in giving artists the tools to share the music they make, and I’m curious if any of our artists can come up with a creative way to use scannable QR codes to share their music.

Off the top of my head:

Artists could copy and paste their track’s QR code and put it on a show flier or business card.

Venues could print a QR code of each artist performing that night on the playbills they post.

Music magazines could print a QR code of the artist they are featuring.

Artists could incorporate their QR codes into a t shirt design.

On mobile, listeners could easily share songs by scanning the QR code.

I fully realize that the current state of scanning on smartphones isn’t that great. The cameras don’t always capture the codes, the code analysis is slow. By the time I fire up a scanning app, scan the code, and wait for it to push me to the track on bln.kr, I could have just typed in the short code in my browser and be listening to the track.

BUT, the pace of mobile computing advancement is staggering, and we can see a time when scanning is immediate and actually more convenient than typing.

So we are providing QR codes to our artists in the hope that they can be used creatively today and just in case we all end up living in a barcoded world someday.

I would love to get your thoughts on QR codes on bln.kr. Are they useful? Are they in the way?

And while we are at it, what other emerging technologies can we leverage to make sharing your music more innovative?