Artist Benefits
The profile page will enable artists to share personal information about them with their fans. The page will also contain a mini-forum, which will allow active interaction between fans and the artists as well as among fans themselves. Such a feature can be valuable for the artists as it will allow them to gain insight how their music is received by the audience and receive feedback from them as well. From the fans' perspective, the mini-forum will be an useful feature because it will let them have a more enriching and fulfilling experience for they will be able to have personal interaction with those behind the music they enjoy and also with those who enjoy the same music as well.
Artists will have the option of turning off their personal mini-forum if they feel that it is not valuable for them.
Music Linking and Uploading
If artists already have files of the music they wish to share somewhere else on the web, then they can easily link to them on their profile page.
If they wish to set-up a reliable and a stable song repository within Cardinal Music, then for a small fee they can upgrade their membership, which will allow them to easily upload files onto the Cardinal Music server. The files they upload will then appear on their profile page for download.
The file upload service will be valuable for the artists as they will be able to avoid the overhead of having to find a hosting service online and set-up their own distribution hub. This easy-to-use file upload service, coupled with other features, offered by Cardinal Music will appeal to artists to use Cardinal Music as their primary location for music on the web.
The file upload service will be valuable to Cardinal Music as it will provide a source of revenue for the website in addition to advertisements. This income will then be used to cover hosting and maintenance costs.
Create Custom Pages for Bands
The ability to create custom pages for a band is useful because it allows an artist (or a group of them) to create content for fans that are separate from their own individual profiles. That way, they would be able to avoid having their personal page attempting to do too much or even clashing with the content and style of the band page.
Furthermore, the site will have page building tools that will facilitate the creation of a web page for bands. For those who are more web-savvy, the site will allow a subset of the (X)HTML tags to be used to create more customized pages.
Finally, the fact that the site will have built-in support to create your own band pages will relieve artists of the burden and the overhead of having to set-up their own websites, which would include finding reliable hosting and the technical know-how of creating and uploading web pages on your own.
Participate in the Standard Tagging System
The artists will be have the ability to tag their own music. Unlike the regular user tags, these artist tags will be utilized to generate the primary navigation system on the website via category browsing. This feature of letting artists partake in the Standard Tagging System is useful because it invites the artists to contribute their own opinions of how their music should be categorized, and since their tagging will drive the primary navigation browser, they will have an incentive to participate in the tagging and thereby in fact join Cardinal Music.
The artists will also have the option of not participating in the tagging system if they do not wish for their music to be classified.
