Whatever happened to hatchet day?

I expect by now, many of you are wondering what happened to my hatchet day post which was due last week. Well one thing I always do before actually posting is go back and read what I've written. I like to hope that in general I provide a post which both reflects my own opinions whilst attempting to provide a balanced view at the same time, so the reader can make up their own mind. And I found that what I'd written didn't pass the test, nor could I write it in a way that would make it pass the test, because I'd been beaten by circumstances.

Let me explain.

My time on Sellaband has been progressively getting less and less since the website changes back at the end of June. As a result, a week or so into August I migrated and started listening to music elsewhere, because it was taking too long to track down the new artist signups on the Sellaband site. And whilst that problem has been fixed with the recently re-introduced artist search, the other problem is still there. Yes folks, we're back to the bad old days of "inactive" profiles. I haven't done an exact calculation over a period of time (though I'm sure someone will manage that for me), but I'd guess there's roughly a 60% chance that when you do find a newly signed up artist, the profile in question will have no music or information, even if you wait at least a week for it to appear. In fact, of signups in the last 7 days, only 10 out of 27 had any music on their page when I last did a check. So with so much wasted time trying to find new music on Sellaband and still no indication of when the situation might be improved, I'm now listening elsewhere for the forseeable future.

A couple of people from the Sellaband userbase have already spotted where I've migrated to, and left comments on my profile there, so they'll also be able to confirm I've listened to over 1700 tracks in the time since I migrated. A feat not possible in the same length of time on Sellaband at present.

Whilst some problems have been fixed, and indeed continue to be fixed, I still regard the Sellaband website as in a worse state than when I originally signed up to it in 2006 from a listener point of view. Couple this with the fact a number of artists on the site are leaving through various reasons (including getting signed - the latest of those is Chupacabra, if you hadn't spotted, even though like many "left" artists the profile hasn't gone yet) and it's getting to the point I'm getting more parts returned to my profile than I've seen an equivalent value return in revenue from 50K artists via the site. It doesn't help that we're now heading into the 3rd month when no revenue of any kind has been paid into believer profiles. Forget that we're overdue for the values assigned to one quarter of third party sales and that a second will be coming due soon - we're also talking that no revenue through the site itself has been paid, including the compensation for stopping the advertising.

Profiles are still a mess. As someone who has been on the site for the vast majority of its life, I noticed that one of the "upgrades" brought back all old profile comments that had been deleted, whether manually by the user or as a result of the artist profiles being removed. It appears a rather selective fix has been applied to that particular problem - or maybe the data is as screwed as my comments section would suggest. Seems that somewhere in the process, a number of artists managed a name change, even though they didn't have a profile on the site any longer. For instance, Elleanore comments have gone again while comments from The Super Dead remain and Luna Assassins are now called Noname157. All deleted artists and all treated differently, and that's just one example of a much wider problem (there's a lot of Noname lurking around for starters). Add to that the expanded "artists I like" section (though mysteriously the similar "friends" section remains as it was) and the whole thing still looks a bit of a joke once you go deeper than the (mostly surface) changes which have been happening. Some serious housekeeping needs to be done to sort out this complete mess, but I'm thinking it'll be months before we see it.

In short, it's not a site I'm happy with as a believer at the moment. I'm not planning to buy any new parts at present as a result (exception would be if someone looks like hitting 50K, I fancy a CD and I don't have a part) and therefore any "hatchet day" would be removals back into my balance only. As I'm not really visiting or listening to any new music on Sellaband either, it's kind of reached the point where a "hatchet day" post is going to turn into one big long whinge about Sellaband and have very little musical content, which is exactly the reverse of its original intent to perhaps introduce you to music on the site you might have missed.

So for the moment, my hatchet day postings are effectively suspended. Maybe they'll return and maybe they won't. Much of that depends on whether this new web team can actually return the site to the condition it was in before the update in June. And how quickly. As I've already said on my profile page, if my balance starts getting too large I will start removing money from the system, and I'm just about to request a payout that will mean I've removed more than has been credited in revenue. No parts have been removed from artists to do this, rather this is all money returned through artists leaving as my normal "hatchet day" has always reassigned money where I've done the removal. So much for re-investing. I'm also getting very inclined to start withdrawing parts back into my balance from some of the low budget and long time inactive, as well as those stating on their profile that they've left the site, so keep your eyes out, because next "hatchet day" might actually be a "half-a-hatchet day". And who knows what the status will be if this debacle is still going on come Christmas.