Enthusiast Benefits
Just as with the artist profiles, the profiles for enthusiasts are meant to encourage interaction witin the Cardinal Music community. The enthusiast profiles, however, will contain elements different from those of artist profiles. Enthusiasts will be able to list their musical interests, favorites artists/song, links to their reviews, and any personal information that they will feel comfortable sharing.
The enthusiast profile will serve as an essential component to the underlying social network that will pervade Cardinal Music. Therefore, much focus will be given to creating a profile template that emulates succesful elements of profile pages from current social networking giants, while ensuring that users will have an unique Cardinal Music experience.
Rate Songs and Artists
In a manner similar to most other music websites, Cardinal Music will offer its users the ability to rate songs and artists using a 1 to 5 star system. They will also, in addition, be able to post textual critiques of the content to which they have listened. These features will be elemental to the social network that Cardinal Music will attempt to build.
Friends Lists and Groups
Cardinal Music users will be able to create groups and have a list of friends based on their shared interests. These features are standard components of any social networking site and therefore, given the goal of Cardinal Music attempting to becoming a social network built around Stanford music, such features are absolutely neccessary.
Participate in the Custom Tagging System
While artists will have exclusive access to adding to the Standard Tagging System, enthusiasts will be able to participate in a parellel tagging system that will be called "Custom Tagging System." The Custom Tagging System will be similar to those found on sites such as YouTube and Facebook where users can tag a song or an artist with an associated word.
The custom tags will not be used in the primary category-driven browsing system. The primary browsing system will instead utilize the standard tags that artists specify. Nevertheless, all users will have the option of turning on browsing by custom tags, if they so choose.
The reason that users will be able to toggle the custom tag-driven browsing on or off is because users may become overwhelmed by too many tags or may disagree with the classifications that other users have placed upon songs and artists.
