Music Tasmania is the peak industry body representing Tasmania’s music industry and their mission is to develop, connect and advocate for the music industry, which comprises artists and bands, live music venues, promoters and festivals, music retailers, educators, along with small businesses specialising in areas such as production, management, and other support services.
We first worked with Music Tasmania in 2014 when we built their current website. We were armed with the task of building an online community website that would help the organisation to meet its objectives. The Drupal content management system was our platform of choice for this project.
The website has been going strong since it was launched, with hundreds of pages being added in that time. We've recently given the website a serious upgrade by integrating it with the Spotify online music platform. This gives the website's users the ability to play tracks, albums and play lists directly from Spotify - giving them another way to discover Tasmanian music. It also provides music artists with another way to generate revenue and build a fan base from their content.
Tasmanian music showcase
The Music Tasmania website features a directory of Tasmanian music artists which has become a valuable place to find Tasmanian music. Individual artists can manage their own profile page and they have access to tools for publishing their own content. The artist profile pages have always included videos from Youtube and music from SoundCloud, but neither of these platforms provide remuneration for the artists. The inclusion of Spotify means that when a user plays music from the artists profile pages, the artist will get remunerated accordingly. For this reason alone, we expect that when artists update their profiles, the Spotify option will get used the most. Some pages that have already been updated are:
A complete backend solution
Not only does the website provide tools for Music Tasmania's online community, it also provides a complete backend solution for the organisation itself. Music Tasmania is driven by membership and it provides services for its members. We integrated their website with ecommerce features that sell membership online. The ecommerce solution is tightly integrated with the content management system that controls access to some of the content, so the website is used to grant access to content and functionality which is available only to users with a valid membership. The website also streamlines the administration of the membership base by automatically handling membership renewals and giving Music Tasmania ways to keep records of their members.
The Music Tasmania website is a excellent example of how a website that is built on Drupal can be used to provide turn-key solutions for users with varying levels of access. It provides functionality that creates an online community and empowers them with the tools to publish content, manage users and streamline business administration. The integrations with third party platforms also make it very easy for users to publish content, like music and videos, with no technical expertise required.
