OK folks, I know I’ve been talking about these things for quite some time, so I’m happy to report that we’ve got some huge news!

• ALBUMS SUPPORT!
• That’s right, guys! If you log into your account as an artist, you should see two brand-spanking-new buttons! “Add Album” and “Manage Albums”. They should be pretty self-explanatory, and the vendor is about 100x simpler than the current multi-song vendor. We’re talking one prim, click for info, pay to buy the album. It’s that simple. There’s still no singles vendor (one song per vendor), but you could very easily create that by making a one-song album and using the album vendor. Temporary workaround should hold you over. Oh, and these vendors are totally linkable, just make sure that the ROOT PRIM (the last one you link) doesn’t have any scripts in it.
• DELETE THOSE ROGUE SONGS!
• In the early stages of t2, many people added multiple copies of the same song, songs without MP3s, and otherwise tunes they just didn’t care to keep available. If you retired those songs before anyone bought them, you can now delete them permanently. Unfortunately, if someone bought them before they retired, we need to keep them in the system. This is to protect fans that haven’t downloaded their content from having them disappear on them!
• RESET YOUR PASSWORD!
• I can’t count the number of passwords I’ve reset manually in the past 4 months, but now any SECONDtunes user can click the “I forgot my password” link on the sign-in page and have a new one IMed to them in-world. Occasionally SL’s Object E-mail system gets a little crazy, so if it doesn’t work, try again in 15 minutes. If all else fails you can still give me a holler in-world.

Those 3 items were huge demands from artists, and personally I think that the albums support feature will increase usability at live performances incredibly. The vendors didn’t work so well in laggy situations, but the new album vendors should be just what the doctor ordered!

Here’s a look at what’s on the horizon as far as development is concerned:

• SINGLES VENDORS
• The ability to sell one song at a time is a must for live performances (thanks to lag). For the time being, see the above workaround. This will be here very soon, though!
• MP3 TIPJARS
• You will be able to assign ONE track to be given away for tips (with a configurable minimum amount). There will be NO COMMISSION paid to SECONDtunes for this service. We’re hoping to increase both tips to musicians (by offering an incentive) and album sales on SECONDtunes (by giving a “free taste”). Of course it will be full mod, so whether it’s a guitar-wielding gargoyle or a simple guitar case, you can give fans something back for their generosity.
• MP3 SPLODERS
• Sploders are huge in SL, so why not have them give away an MP3 instead of money, clothes, or whatever? Venue owners can pick the artists, and what percentage they’d like to receive above the overhead (just like the associates program in the current vendors). As soon as it’s reached critical mass it will explode, giving a song to the winner.
• ARTIST BLASTS
• Let’s face it: The groups system in SL sucks. The artists should have all noticed that they’ve started to receive occasional messages from me through an object called “SECONDtunes Artist Blast”. This is the beginnings of a “fan club” type system that will allow you to communicate with your fans SIMPLY! Through a single-click interface, they’ll be able to sign up for your blasts at live performances, and you can let them know when you’re playing, when new downloads are available, or just what you’re watching on TV. Most of the work is done for this on the LSL end, it’s just tying together the databases here and getting it out there. This will be free for all t2 artists!

That about covers it for today! Thanks for your patience, and let me know if there’s anything I can do for you! Artists that want a custom album vendor, just let me know and we’ll work something out (probably in the realm of L$1k). Of course the standard vendor is moddable, so the only reason to pay me is if you want it done quickly and you can’t do it yourself.

Enjoy the updates! Time for me to finally sleep now!

Things are progressing almost faster than I can keep up with them!  I’ve been pretty sick in RL over the past couple of weeks, thanks to too many night spent driving instead of sleeping, probably.  Anyway, there will be a major update to the vendor this week, and I wanted to let everyone know what the update will consist of:

• A (barely) better looking vendor
• The ability to display multiple users in a vendor
• The ability for venue or store owners to sell your music for an additional commission (it will not change your take, it will add to the selling price in THEIR VENDOR ONLY, depending on what markup they assign).
• Added ability to auto-update your vendor.  All you will have to do to bring your vendor up-to-date is rez an “Update Patch” object within 20m of your vendor(s).
• With the auto-update ability means that you can make significant changes to your vendor’s look and feel (ie- add “Tip Me” buttons, an answering machine, or pretty much anything else you want.  The next step (for version 1.0) is to have an API for changing the way users interact with a vendor.  Hopefully this will inspire innovation and new designs for the vendors.  If they’re really cool you may even be able to sell your pimped out vendor to other SECONDtunes artists and/or venue/store owners.  More info on this coming soon!
• An added item to your “Artist Information” for a texture to display for your spot in vendors.  By default it’s just a simple “t² Artist” square.  If you visit the store in Yongnam, you can see that a couple of artists have textures already, and it makes for a much cooler experience.
• A couple of performance fixes to make it run a little smoother (small things like not having to click the vendor to initiate it after permissions are set).
• A distributable notecard with a simple primer for new listeners.  This should save a couple of the “so how does this work” questions.
• More stuff I’m not remembering now because I’m still doped up on cold & flu medicine.

I’m way excited about the new API, because I’m no dummy when it comes to understanding my limitations, especially in terms of building in SL.  I’m getting pretty good at the scripting stuff, but trying to make cool stuff with the touchpad on my laptop while on the road proves to be a giant pain in the butt!  This will hopefully provide a creative outlet for folks, as well as improving the product as a whole.  Some ideas for things folks will be able to do: Replace the Object Text method of displaying song information possibly with XYText or some other texture-font, Create a chat-based version that could possibly interact with text-based clients like SLeek, Make a menu-based artist or song selector, or plenty of other things I haven’t even thought of.  You can expect to see the API begin to take shape with version 0.91.  I’ll probably put a wiki up to allow for contributions of cool scripts, as well as to let folks know about new calls and functions available.

Be expecting this gigantic update in the next 48 hours!