The remainder of the year is going to be jam-packed with releases. I don’t want to oversell my ambitions, so I won’t go into specifics by setting expectations that might not happen. Regardless, expect a whirlwind of releases between now and the end of the year. Certainly enough to keep y’all busy through the holidays.
In other news, I want to let everyone know that I’ve decided NOT to raise rates and the subscription price for Party Favorz which will remain at $3.99 a month (cancel anytime).
I’ve been paying a premium price for two-different DJ services but one in particular which provides the latest commericial, alternative and funky house tracks either never get them because DJs were holding their tracks back longer than usual or got them and 2 minutes of the song would be removed — literally cut out of the end — forcing me to have to pay for them through Beatport or Traxsource. This wasn’t an anomaly since it happened more often than not.
Couple that with independent DJs charging ridiculous prices on Bandcamp for their remixes ($6 – 8 a track), which hits the Circuit & Anthems series hard — my costs were spiralling out of control.
I get that the world is in an inflationary period at the moment and the costs of goods and services has gone up but you can’t overestimate your value in a market with stiff competition. In short, I’m all for supporting the independent work of DJs who have suffered tremedously due to COVID but I refuse to be gouged.
There’s another DJ service that I used several years ago, which is quite good and has just about everything I need to work out these sets and costs much less. My biggest issue with them is their user interface is not navigation friendly, it requires a lot of research per track to find out what’s hot, which in turn requires more time spent on any given mix to deliver the latest and greatest. I easily put in about 60 hours a week on Party Favorz — something most people can’t fully appreciate. Between the website, design, coding, app development (I’ll get to that in a minute), song selection, mastering, mixing, editing, artwork and customer service…it’s a lot of work but I don’t complain.
It’s possible I may be switching over to Apple Music after the first of the year (a lot more work) and either use them soley for operations or in conjunction with Podbean. I haven’t decided yet. You’ll know when it happens as I plan on taking several weeks off after the first of the year to make the switch.
We’ve got an app!
The app has been finished for awhile now and I’ve tested it out. It works flawlessly.
When you’re on mobile or tablet, you may have noticed a pop-up that says ‘Add Party Favorz to Home screen.’ Clicking on that will ask for your permission to install the Party Favorz app on your device and will then proceed to install. It will be listed in your apps or on an empty space of your home screen depending on the permissions you have setup on your device. If it’s in your apps, you can add it to any screen you like (every device is different so please don’t ask — just Google it).
If you saw the pop-up in the past and waived it away, it may no longer be showing for you (since we don’t like to nag people). Since I don’t have a direct download link and in order to get it to reappear — you’ll need to clear your browser’s cache and refresh the front page of Party Favorz.
A long hold on the app icon will provide you with shortcuts to the Dance Club, Circuit & Anthems, Peak Hour and Disco House categories or you can just tap the app to open up the front page. The app is no different than navigating the website (i.e. easy and intuitive), which makes it easier to find older episodes than say the Podbean app. No scrolling over 700 episodes. The accordion menu in the upper lefthand corner is your best friend as every category and sub-category is listed and categories like Diva Hall of Fame and Legacy have scrollable sub-menus with every artist alphabetized. Top Dance Club Songs of the Year is grouped by decade with subcategories listed numerically.
If you click on the ‘Playlist‘ category you’ll get the Podbean player that lists the latest 300 episodes, which is also scrollable for playback on any device. If you have the Privacy Badage extension in your browser, you’ll need to add an exception for https://partyfavorz.com/ in order to get the player to show up.
A lot of thought has gone into the overall design of the website, navigation and the app. I can’t recommend enough that subscribers take advantage of their subscriptions by perusing the menu to find episodes. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve had suggestions for episodes that already exist. (No complaints, I’m just pointing out what seems obvious to me but may not be to everyone else.)
I’m still working on getting the official logo to pop-up on the splash screen as the square ‘PF’ is strictly to accomodate all the different shapes on mobile devices it has to squeeze into even though it’s not the official logo. There’s a way to do this but I haven’t figured it out yet. If any of you code for a living, feel free to reach out to me here.
What the app doesn’t do is send out notifications. While it truly is an app in it’s own closed environment (you can’t navigate out of it), configuring it to send out notifications for new posts is more complicated and requires JavaScript and REST API knowledge that I don’t possess. I’m not about to pay thousands of dollars to have someone create and maintain it for me either. The nice thing about this app is that it doesn’t require any permissions from you (i.e. no camera, contacts, messages, microphone, etc.) nothing at all so your privacy is guaranteed as it’s already encrypted.
If you’re using Chrome or Firefox on your desktop or laptop, you’ll see a tiny notification icon to install the app on your computer in the upper-righthand corner of your screen so it works across multiple devices. On the other hand, Safari doesn’t recognize the PWA install and requires a plethora of screenshots and some modifications to make it work. I can do it but it takes some time so I likely won’t get around to doing that until next year (sorry) but blame that on Apple.
Finally…
This was a much longer newsletter than I anticipated but now everyone is up to date. Just make sure you buckle in because Party Favorz is going to be in rapid release mode between now and the end of the year. Until the next time…ENJOY! -K
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