I’m out on the road in real-life, so updates will be slower and SL appearances fewer.  I noticed some duplicate songs in the database, and it raised (for me) an interesting dillema that I anticipate hearing about from artists:  “How do I delete a song?”

This presents a problem, because if I allow the deletion of songs, it could possibly break the experience for the listener (ie. They purchased the song and haven’t gotten around to downloading it yet and you delete it before they can.)  I want the experience to be as useful, simple, and rewarding as possible for everyone, so the solution I’ve come to is the ability to “Retire” songs.  This will be useful for artists who only want to sell a song for a limited time, or for those who have not purchased a new license for their cover recording.  It will also make an easy fix for “accidents” in the song addition process.

If you retire a song before it has any purchases, I should be able to delete it permanently (so as not to muck up your artist tools page with duplicates).  We’ll deal with that on a case-by-case basis.

I hope that this makes things simpler (yes, that means you, JueL!) and better.  I’ve started working on the ability to create special vendors with only specified songs (rather than your whole library) as well as some alternative ways of accessing the vendor (possibly with a menu system rather than the click-to-change system currently in place).

Also, I changed the welcome message received by new users to (hopefully) make it easier to find their new temporary password and understand that registration is done automatically at the time of purchase.  In the next vendor update we’ll be ditching the free t-shirt in favor of a notecard for new users.

I’ll be working on some code from my laptop when I’m off the stage and not asleep, but it probably won’t be updated until after the weekend.  If anyone has any immediate concerns, please feel free to e-mail me at bobby@bobbyfairweather.com.  You all have a great weekend, and get to selling that music!