JPF Home Page Forums Lyric and MP3 Feedback MP3 Feedback Forum Do you all want GENRE boards?

Ben,

We're not losing traffic to other music message boards, we're losing it to Facebook and Twitter because people don't see the benefit of using a message board as a way to communicate. They don't want the depth etc.

Scotty,

We have a LOT more than 20 people who are here regularly. It's your comment that worries me the most. We need folks to interact with more than the same 20 people or we may as well shut down. JPF has 50K members on our email list. Our last music awards saw 42K albums sent in from over 30K different people. We've featured over 16K artists at one of our live shows and had over 25K members come to a live JPF event not even counting cities where we've had chapters over the years and all their activities. The message board used to see 5K people log in a day. We had one occasion where 1456 people were on the board at the same time (our all time record high). The idea that some think only 20 people exist here, or the truth that we rarely have more than 60 people logged in at one time with another 100-400 additional unregistered (or members who haven't logged in) people reading posts here is problematic. As I type this at 9:20 US Eastern Time, we have 28 Registered, 8 registered but choosing to be hidden and 142 non registered people on the boards. We also have another 2984 people on the rest of the JPF site. Those numbers are near what we used to have back in the late 90's before Facebook and Twitter and when we only had a few thousand members. Compare all this to the fact that we had 680 paid attendees at our last music awards from over two dozen countries around the world and another 2 dozen US states who flew in to be there. We averaged 30-40 performers per show and 100 people in the audience. We had many shows where we hit 70 performing acts (including over 50 full bands at one show) and over 350 people all directly connected with JPF (rather than fans) in the audience. I've met over 25K JPF members face to face over the years.

So.. we can do MORE to get people out. I don't want to be a site which exists so 20 friends can chat among themselves and that's what I pay all this money for. (And we've never been THAT small even in the early days). We need to be more welcoming to others and offer something of use and value to get people to invest the time, which is far harder than getting their money (which is why FB is so valuable to people who track their every action and make money from it.. but that's another topic). It's fine to have friends. But that's for an individual. We need to create a community site and experience and involved hundreds and thousands like we used to.

Brian