There have been a lot of comments and questions that have been made lately by several people, so we thought it was about time to give you all an update on what we’re currently working on, as well as answer some of your questions. 

You’ve probably noticed that there hasn’t really been any noticeable changes to the site in quite a while.  This is because we’re currently working on some bigger parts of the site in our development environment which have not yet been made live.  Most of this is related specifically to community-based areas of the site, including user profile pages, discussion forums, etc.  We’ve also been busy getting the site ready to eventually open to a public beta (once we have a few other things taken care of).

Here is the latest on some of the more popular topics/questions.

Browsing / Search: We’ve seen your comments regarding browsing artists alphabetically by letter, and we agree that this area needs some additional updates.  As stated above, we’re currently focused on some of the community-based aspects of the site, but once these are done we promise to revisit the browsing and navigation of the tabs themselves.  We’ll find better ways to browse within a specific letter (not just numbers for pages of results), we’ll work on a way to view all artists within a single letter, and we’ll look at the way the filter for the instrument is working.

Available Tabs vs. Tabs that Need Data: We definitely appreciate all the data that has been input so far on tabs that require additional information.  This is information will start being utilized soon as we continue to seek licenses and add additional content to the site.  However, we also understand that having available tabs and tabs that are not available due to insufficient data is not an ideal way to browse tabs.  Once we start working on search and navigation again we’ll make sure to make it clear in search results which songs are available and which ones need more information.

Crappy Ads: There have been some complaints about the ad content on the site, and we pretty much agree with you – the ads for the most part have been really crappy.  We’ve talked to the company who manages the ad content and they’ve gone through the system and taken out some of the worse ones, (like the Britney nipple slip video) so hopefully the ads will at least be somewhat respectable now.  That said, the site absolutely needs advertisements to survive in the long term, both to pay for the costs of actually running it and to pay the music publishers for the songs they are licensing us.  We’ll be able to have much nicer and more appropriate advertisements on the site once we open to the public and have more users on the site – but for now I wouldn’t worry too much about them.  The main advertisement block in the middle of the page is not going to be advertising only; it will also house some actual content once we finish some of the community features of the site… but these ads need to exist and we appreciate that you mostly all understand that.  In the meantime, if you see an ad that you think is appropriate or interesting we encourage you to click on it as it will help our system learn… and if you see an ad that you think really needs to go away, please let us know and we’ll try to take care of it.

Tab Submissions: Tab submissions are going to be one of the last things we add to the site for two simple reasons: 1.) they require the community back end to be fully in place (an area we are working on now) and 2.) we want the tabs you submit to actually have a good chance of going up to the site.  Number 2 basically requires us to have as many contracts in place as possible… which leads to:

Additional Tabs / Licenses: As many of you know, we have officially announced deals with BMG (Now part of Universal), Famous (Now part of Sony/ATV) and peermusic.  In addition we have licenses from a few thousand other publishers who have opted in to license MXTabs through the Harry Fox Agency.  There are two other major publishers who are currently very interested in MXTabs, one of which already has content on the site but I can’t officially announce yet and another which I also can’t announce because I don’t want to jinx anything.  Along with these publishers, some of our existing publishers are not fully integrated into the system yet which means that there are a lot of songs that we already have rights to that are still not activated.  We’re hoping to change this soon, but this is why we are still in alpha mode…. it will happen, but we just have to be patient when working with music publishers as this is a very new concept/business model for many of them.

I think that covers most of the major issues/ questions that have come up – and should give you a good idea of what we’re working on right now.  If you have any questions, comments or concerns please post them in the comments section below.  Soon we’ll have the forums up and working (as mentioned above) but for now, continue to use the blog for feedback.