Tom Watts SoundJam co-founder sits down with DJ and producer Jimi Needles to talk through the platform, show off some of the key functionality and answer Jimi’s burning questions.

It’s a 15 minute video covering some of the key points of the DJ website builder and how it can benefit you, so grab yourself a cup of tea…

Head below the video to see chapter sections and a full transcription.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfkSmSVJOhk

You can jump to these key points in the YouTube video.

0:00 INTRO

0:44 ECOMMERCE / SHOP

3:05 MERCHANDISE / PRINT ON DEMAND

4:02 SOCIAL EMBEDDING

6:17 TWITCH / STREAMING

8:02 PATREON / EXTERNAL LINKS

9:30 VIDEO EMBEDDING

11:19 COLOURS

11:44 EFFECTS

12:40 RESPONSIVE DESIGN

13:50 NEWSLETTER SIGNUP

Jimi

COVID-19 thing has kind of affected all of our income streams in terms of like playing live, but having a look at the shot would be pretty cool first because, again, like it’s increasingly hard to sell and control where your music is. I think it’s all in one place. And I don’t have to go through per se Band camp or Sound Cloud. I can sell direct.  That’s great. And there’s I mean, my next question would be does sound jam do they take any commission from that?

Tom

They don’t actually. So unlike any other platform, with Bandcamp, etc., we don’t take commission at all. So you keep 100% of profit minus a payment processor, so I pay how you can’t avoid that, unfortunately. But apart from that you keep everything. So yeah, it’s a really big advantage over some of the other platforms.

Jimi

So how would I set that up in terms of if I wanted to sell new release?

Tom

Yep. So you just add edit to the end of your domain. To get into the kind of design area of the site. We’ve already set the shop page up. And then you go to your dashboard and go to e commerce, which is just so far, we’ve put it basically as it walks you through the whole process, so you add where your locations are, you can add shipping, if you’re selling physical products line or merchandise, etc.

Jimi

Will that will that work out for you?

Tom

Yeah. And it will apply local tax as well if you need it too. Or you can turn that option off. You also add your payment processors as a number you can use. But PayPal is the kind of standard one for just using online purchases. And it’s easiest one set up. And then yeah, you just go into catalo. It’s really easy. We’ve got set up this one product so it’s just a name. It’s a bit brief description, the image. And then for a digital sale, for example, you add your file there, which is what they’ll get.

Jimi

And that was my next question. That seems very easy to me.

Tom

Pretty easy. Yeah. So yeah, and then you can add it to your cart. And it’s just a really simple clean checkout. And that’s it.

Jimi

This is very impressive. This is potentially more straightforward and Bandcamp.

Tom

The other good thing about it all is that you have total control over people that are buying from you. So you get to know your users better, and then send them out an email the next time you’ve got a new release.

Jimi

Yes. So would it save their email to CSV?

Tom

Yeah, it’s all in it’s all in the system. Yeah. So you know, you were asking about pre orders, weren’t you?

Jimi

Yeah.

Jimi

So yeah, pre orders are totally possible. All you would do, just make it clear in the kind of product text that it says it’s a pre order, and it would not dispatch until same day. Yeah, we’ve also got some integrations now. So you were talking about merchandise learning.

Jimi

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Tom

We’ve actually got print on demand integration. So you can buy your stock beforehand, which I think you’re going to do on us.

Jimi   

That’s right. Yeah,

Tom

You can come here, there’s loads of apps that you can actually add. And then if we…Yeah, so there’s one here called Printful. And these guys do print on demand. So you can set up t shirts, hats, mugs, and tote bags and stuff like that in your shop, with your logos ready to go but you don’t actually hold any stock. As soon as you sell one through your shop, it then goes off to Printful they print it and ship it basically. So it’s um, it’s like, you don’t have to outlay any money whatsoever. Hmm, sounds good. Retching dice. Yeah. Printful. One of the kind of big suppliers in this kind of print on demand game, so and they’re really good. The quality is high. They ship all over the world

Jimi

in terms of like the standard social media, you know, you get your Facebook you’ve got your Instagram and then you’ve got more modern apps like Tik Tok kind of thing like that. Is there like a way I can import portions of my news feeds from say Instagram?

Tom

Yeah, there is it depends which platform it is some we’ve got integrations for straightaway mix cloud Sound Cloud, Facebook, Twitter, kind of native import options in here so you can just search so if you want to mix cloud element and you can literally just drag that lock it into any way you like, and add a mix down.

Jimi

So if I wanted to have like a splash screen, it’s got the video on it if I wanted to say import to the very top of my page my say my latest mixtape which is like, like as a DJ that might mix his mixtapes to find me quite a lot. So I’d like to see that on my home page. He wants to go on my Sound Cloud and get the widget would want? Well, how would I do that?

Tom

Right? So you go into the elements, just search for things if you want to search for them, it saves you the time. And then you drag that on to the site. And if you grab, you can either grab the individual track domain by the share button or you can if you take your channel domain, when you’re when you’re back here and adding that here, it will, it will display your latest track, basically. So once you set that as your channel domain, you don’t need to update it again.

Jimi

That seems relatively easy to set up. And that’s great.

Tom

Yeah it’s pretty cool.

Jimi

I think I could then move that up and down on my splash page on my homepage.

Tom

Yeah, you can drag out another one. And you can change the width of it. So we’ve got two here and there. They’re actually the same. And yeah, you can see that they’re showing the same thing. Yeah, I’ve adjusted the weight, the one of them won’t want to put a bit more spacing in between the two. So you just drag a little handle there. Refresh over here and then. And then yeah, the spacing adjusted there.

Jimi

Sweet.

Tom

It’s really easy just kind of drag things out, drag a handle, move things around. And that’s it. So like I said, we’ve got quite a lot of integrations baked right in. But obviously, there’s so many platforms, it’s hard to keep pace. Everyone’s so which is the thing now, which wasn’t two months ago, for DJs. Anyway, yeah, if there’s an integration like that, then you can just from here, just grab the HTML code block. And you drag that in, and then you paste in your standard embed code. So you can anything any platform has a decade or so. So say your next streams on twitch. Yes, you can send people straight to twitch. But also Yes, you could send them to a special page on your website, which, which leads them on to your shop and other you know, you can sit to a products around that athlete, so yeah, a good way to get people hooked into the other stuff that you’re doing, rather than which being in control. You’re in control. Yeah, so people can Nik walk to your shop and buy something while they’re watching the stream. And it just keeps everything together in one place and then hopefully leads to bigger and better things in terms of people buying and spending more time with what you’re doing.

Jimi

Twitch and streaming has been quite a big part of my life the last three months, guys for most DJs. But the other thing that’s kind of been keeping me going income wise is my Patreon. And it’s the number one thing that I’ve been pushing right now as a platform because you know, that not that much money, people, everyone can come together and pay a little bit together and get tons of exclusive content. And they’re relatively kind of, it’s impossible to kind of like post stuff on it because or embed it because they’re private links and that would obviously defy the point. But if I could somehow embed some kind of like my tears page, for instance, which is public how would I go about doing something like that?

Tom

You can easily add a menu item to External links. So you could add a pin in there, you could add.

Jimi

How would I do that? That sounds good.

Tom

Yeah, no worries. So you go to your dashboard. You go to pages, and this is the pages that you’ve got. And then you simply go to add a new page. And you select that as an external page. So we give that title, Patreon. This is fine your page. That’s the one there. So yeah, we put that as a menu item we set the target as new tab just means it opens in a new window, which is standard thing to do for External links. Save it I probably just move it over one. So it’s the contact is the far one on the right. And then that should be it.Yeah, there we go.

Jimi   

Got that. That’s exactly what I want to add right there. Right.

Jimi

Okay. You know, there’s no code coding involved. It’s very much like an idiot proof platform. I don’t know anything about coding or HTML, apart from the stuff I learned back in 2004 for my space, that’s it. But um, even back then it was too late. And that’s, kind of it reminds the platform behind like, behind the scenes, and reminds me of that. It’s very easy, very simple, and very intuitive. And I like that.

Tom

Yeah. And it’s got a lot of power as well. It’s not…

Jimi

Yeah, the last thing I wanted to speak to you about was you very kindly enabled a splash video on my page. Now it’s not imported from because this is this is on YouTube. Is that important from YouTube? Was that his own post?

Tom

Sure, it can be it can be either, so it’s yes. So we’ve just used the elements and we’ve used a video block and you’ve got the options again, it’s YouTube, Vimeo, or custom and custom is your media source. So you can add you can upload the media. Somewhere and you can upload it to this site and put in an mp4 there, and it will run your own video. Or you can just use the YouTube like we have on your on your one here. The advantage of using the YouTube is there’s a few advantages that site will probably load a little bit quicker. Yeah. Also, the stats will count to your stats on YouTube, which is probably a good thing because you’re always trying to promote on every single platform.

Jimi

Well, that’s brilliant. Thanks so much for going through this all with me today because now I kind of got a I’ve got an underlying knowledge of how to kind of edit my site. Yeah, wasn’t there something I was going to chat about with the colours?

Tom

Yeah, there was actually so well the two things I just wanted to run through really quickly is the colours. So colours or you can create new colours here really simply. So let’s leave things around. Pretty nasty green, but we’ll use it and then with the colours, you can literally just drag it and drop them on to elements and it will change the change the colours for you. So it’s really simple. And the other thing are the effects so there’s all these effects here on how things load. And we see a lot of sites where things kind of fade in and fade out. And that’s kind of stuff that we’ve got going on here. So you find an effect, you drop it on. Yes. And then that’s added a little fade up to that section there.  And again, you can do all of this. So you can drop effects on this logo. And you can drop effects on the text below it just have a little fade in and say you drop the effects. They’re marked up there. Now you can see them, you can turn them off.

Jimi

I see you can delete them, if you’re not happy with it,

Tom

Yeah just go and add another effect. And then, yeah, well, as you saw, we only set up one thing there. But as you scroll down, you can see things are fading in and fading out.

Jimi

This is nice. Yes, yes, indeed. And it’s good.

Tom

So yeah, just a nice little touch just to make the site look just a little bit, a little bit better, a little bit more design a little bit more stuff kind of going on. Maybe one other thing I should mention really quickly is down here. So we’re working on the desktop, obviously at the most If you just change your view here, you can you can move things around, you can change how things display out of the padding, and it will change the view on the tablet view. And then the same on the mobile, you can, you can play around with things here that will make it go and do padding and stuff like that. So just so you know, it’s looking good on all devices, which is obviously.

Jimi

that’s the number one thing I have difficulty with, with, with, you know, kind of even just contemplating making a website, there’s three functions that made it so easy to kind of see if

Tom

It doesn’t look, you know, it’s awful. And Google penalise in search traffic against non-responsive sites. Admittedly, not many people have low responsive sites these days, but I’d imagine that 60-70% of that traffic is going to be mobile site.

Jimi   

Excellent. this is this has been really helpful today so I can now go in delving start tweaking some stuff behind the scenes. Yeah. This is quite exciting. Thank you.

Tom

I never use one more useful thing while you’re here. Well, as we were around Jimmy,

Jimi

You can cut all this off. It’s okay.

Tom

But there’s the forms that you can add here. So if you want you to add like a simple

Jimi

Subscribe to my newsletter.

Tom

Yeah, exactly. So say let’s get rid of the text field. Let’s get rid of the text area. Let’s make it not so wide. That’s, I think you can get rid of the placeholders as well, you’re saying needed to say email twice, saying,

Jimi

I’m going to put that CAPTCHA code and stop those spammers?

Tom

Yeah, exactly. So it’s all here. And there’s a number of different ways you can collect them so you can send data to so you can just have them today arrive into your inbox every time someone signs up and then you can add that to whatever your platform is. You can have them go straight into Mail Chimp, Mail Chimp, obviously is free. No, if you build a mailing list up to 2000 subscribers is free so you can have it go straight to Main list and Mail Chimp super, super important social media I’m a huge fan of but email has been proven to be the number one way to communicate with people. It gets the most attention people. It’s got a far better retention rate than social media.

Jimi

I have to agree if I if I do a shout out, you know, you drop out Sound Cloud widget today. And that track went up at midnight last night. So we had some 70 views when I send that out to my email this afternoon that will go up to like 500 plays easily.

Tom

Yeah, that’s the thing. Email is so much so much more powerful than social media. So the more you can, the more people’s emails you can collect the better. Yeah. And obviously, with the sharp and with the forms and stuff, it’s all it’s all there for you.

Jimi

This is brilliant. Thanks so much.

Tom

No worries man.