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More Improvements and we need your help!

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Dear fellow musician:

As the year draws to a close, I'd like to wish you a safe and joyous holiday season. And we, at All About Jazz, would like to thank you for your continued praise and encouragement.

Reflecting back on 2010, it's been a year of significant improvement, in particular, the sections that support musicians. We made a big push in December (based on your feedback) and we wanted to bring you up to speed on what's new and what's coming soon. Please read on...

We need your help!

If you feel All About Jazz has done important work for jazz musicians over the last 15 years, please show your support of our past efforts and future plans by making a donation. AAJ has the largest jazz musician community online—if everyone gave $5, we'd double our goal, so even a little bit goes a long way.

AAJ still has tremendous potential and we believe our most important contributions to the music are ahead of us, but we can't get there without your help.

You can make a donation, view our two video appeals (serious; funny) and read our text appeal by clicking the yellow fund drive bar above.

Also, between now and and January 31, we're offering $100 off our monthly Showcase promotional campaign service. Now, just $250 for 30 days.

Improvements galore!

We made a bunch changes to your profile page. We moved the Facebook "Like" button to the top, we moved the profile stats to the bottom, we moved the "Follow" link to the CONNECT box, we placed a series of thumbnail photos under the primary photo, and we moved the instrument down to the bio section. We also fixed that pesky international character bug that caused the text in the bio box and press quotes box to disappear. Hallelujah!

If you are crowdfunding a recording project with RocketHub or Kickstarter, add the link to your active project at AAJ. We'll then display a link to your project from your profile page.

Once the URL is entered, a RocketHub or Kickstarter box will appear on the top of the musician profile page like this...

For a sneak peek at how the new audio player will look on your profile page, go here (look for the MUSIC PLAYER box in the right panel).

Lastly, as AAJ expands, we know the growing list of options may seem daunting, so we've created a handy musician's start page. Now you can quickly access all the links that are most important to you through this musician-only portal.

Two Tips

This month's two tips involve using the Photo Gallery.

1. You can select your profile's image by clicking the "Change Photo" link, then clicking the thumbnail image on the subsequent page. AAJ will then auto-set the larger version of the image as your profile's main photo.

2. Always tag your photos with your name. It's not enough to title images—if you want to make them searchable or if you want to associate them with your profile, you'll need to tag them.

Coming soon

We're working on bringing more audio to All About Jazz in the form of an audio player (think MySpace or ReverbNation). The AAJ audio player will be fully integrated with the website, so in addition to placing it on your musician profile page, we'll also place the audio player on a CD review page, an article page, a news page, an event page, and any other page we can connect to your musician profile.

We're making steady progress on a project to aggregate all the jazz calendar data on the planet and push it out to a calendar app for everyone to use. That way, fans will always know who is playing where and when. We know it sounds ambitious, but it can be done, and if anyone can do it, it's AAJ.

We'll be back in touch after the New Year with more musician news to share. Until then...

Happy Holidays!

Michael Ricci

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