The Kollection by Brian Lovin – Founder

Yes, there are bloggers out there getting paid to post certain songs. If you notice an unusually shitty song on a blog, with a copy-paste press release, you can bet your ass there’s something in it for the blogger, bigger than just “sharing music.” Whatever that means anymore.

As many of you know, we like to run preorders on The Kollection for our apparel. I want to explain why we do it, how it works for us and the customer, and what we’re doing now to improve our apparel process.

Why preorders?

We’re still a young apparel company – we’ve been selling clothing for less than a year, and we don’t have a huge amount of time to invest in research/market development. What this means is that for every new product we launch, we don’t have a very accurate picture of how many we should expect to sell or how many we need to be ordering. As time goes on, our formula gets better and better for how many products we can expect to sell in X amount of time.

What’s wrong with this model?

The problem with running preorders is that you, as the customer, usually end up waiting an extra month or so before you see your product. This is because after we run the preorder, we have to actually manufacture the products, ship them to our ‘headquarters,’ package them, then ship them out. This process has been completed in as quickly as 3 weeks, but in the case of our recent Kollector Tees, it has taken about a month.

We are always playing a guessing game to tell customers when the preorders will be ready. If we promise one date, but we run into a delay, it looks bad on us, as a business. For example, we ran into a shipping error this week that delayed our Kollector Tee shipment by 4 days. This results in a lot more work on our end handling customer support, dealing with changed addresses, and any other errors that may come up.

What we’re learning

I want to end this whole preorder process. Despite their ability to help us actually gauge inventory and sales, they are a pain for us and for customers. As we continue with The Kollection, we’re learning more and more about our customers, and building a better idea of how many products we need to manufacture for each run. With this knowledge we can stop running preorders and just produce new apparel on our own, making the initial sales a much smoother process.

So what?

This is really meant for all of our customers out there that are waiting on their Kollector Tees – they are coming soon, I promise! There is also a valuable lesson here for anyone starting their own clothing company. Balancing finances, sales numbers, inventory, and production is a challenge. Here at The Kollection, we’re always pushing ourselves to become faster, more efficient, and easier to work with.

We are learning new things with every venture we pursue – success or otherwise – and using what we’ve learned to make us a better company.

I’m pretty disappointed in the music blogging world right now. It seems like everyone that’s running a music blog has lost their vision. We started these websites for the artists, helping them to grow and succeed, fueling our own sites’ growth in return. However, it has simply become a dog-eat-dog world where blogs could care less about the artists, and more about beating other websites. These days, it’s all about who can get the most traffic, who can post songs first, who can get more fans. Bigger is better in this industry, and every other college music blog out there is doing whatever it takes to expand their reach.

I can tell you all, from the inside of this industry, that there is little to no sense of camaraderie among us bloggers. We see other blogs as our competition, and we have no desire to work with them or even acknowledge their presence. I don’t claim to be above this – we’re all in this one together. Case in point:

Today we sponsored New Linen’s new mixtape, along with Fresh New Tracks. We recognized FNT as co-sponsors, and put the album art on our site with their logo in tact. They published the same mixtape, but oddly our logo is missing. Our logo was clearly, and poorly, photoshopped off the album artwork. This isn’t the first time this has happened to The Kollection, and I’m certain it won’t be the last.

So I pose this question to other bloggers: why are we fighting, tooth and nail, to win over our visitors? When did we stop caring about the music and more about our Facebook fan count? Fresh New Tracks – I’m calling you out. Why did you take our logo off the tape? Are you worried that a few visitors might come to The Kollection? That they might like what they see, or that they’d find some music that you didn’t post?

It’s an interesting thought that every blog has its own style, feel, and community, yet we’re so worried about what every other website is doing. I’m not worried about Kollectors finding Fresh New Tracks and losing them forever. If someone is a fan of The Kollection, it’s for a reason – whether it’s the music we post, our design, our features…whatever. So what if they go to another blog to get music that we decided not to post? It’s the last of my worries – right now I’m focused on making The Kollection the best website that fits the needs of our users.

Fresh New Tracks – you guys need to do the same. If you’re worried about your fans seeing our logo on an album artwork and leaving your site forever, then that speaks volumes to the kind of work you are doing. My advice would be to stop focusing on what we’re doing at The Kollection, and start focusing on building your site to the point that you don’t consider me your competition.

I’m not here to say that every blogger needs to link to each other and start a superficial relationship to make everyone feel good. I’m saying that as bloggers, we need to show some respect to the artists and to each other. We have ALL worked very hard to get to the point that we are able to get our logos on mixtape artwork – and it makes me sick to see that your distrust, your fear, or your dislike towards The K means you have to deface New Linen’s album art to hide us from your visitors.

I’ll leave every blogger out there with this: Stop focusing on what other blogs are doing. If you’re worried about losing your visitors to another website, it’s a strong sign that you’re lacking features and stickiness. Once you build your blog into a self-sustaining culture and community, that’s when you can stop wasting your time photoshopping your competition out of the picture.

Update: Good Music All Day just decided to crop both sponsors out. My point has been made.

I’ll be out of town for the next week. It will be a tough and stressful time for all of the Kollection team, so stay with us.

There is a time and place for The Kollection to blend in with my personal life. Conversely, there are times and places where this blending can be intrusive and annoying. On Facebook, when strangers and managers of unknown artists add me, it’s a bit like tearing away what little privacy I have left online. I love my fans, and I love music, so I need to find a way to create a more moderate level of interaction between myself and my fans/music managers.

I’ve created a separate Facebook profile, where anyone can add me as a friend. I will be using this new platform to talk with fans, managers, and artists on a personal level, without actually inviting the world into my offline life.

Add me today!

Today a William Johnston posted the following message over on the Dubstep Kollection Facebook page:

fuck yall ur missing so many songs its rediculous. stop putting out bullshit and saying its the “dirtiest bass ever”. go fuck yourselves

my little sister could post better dubstep than yall

Normally I take haters like this pretty passively and just blow them off. After all, once you reach a certain market size, there’s bound to be some percentage of users that feel the need to hate on your product or service being offered. However, when I read William’s comment, it triggered something inside of me that made me frustrated with some people’s lack of common sense. So William, if you were trolling or not, you get a very special, personal, reply from The Kollection:

1. Not only was your comment an inappropriate and immature way to get in touch with me, but it is also uncalled for. The Kollection prides itself on being a professional network of blogs that is very aware of our fans’ needs and goals. For you to come onto our Facebook page and tell us to fuck ourselves indicates that you have no respect for the thousands of hours of hard work that we put into the website or the hundreds of thousands of people that appreciate what we are doing for the world of free music.

2. Got better music? Make yourself useful and submit it. Please don’t waste my time.

3. The Kollection distributes free and legal music. This means we have about twenty legal hoops we have to jump through for every song we post. We watch all the major artists out there – dubstep, electro, rap, and indie – and we are very aware of all the good songs out there. Unfortunately, due to this fancy thing called “copyright,” we can’t post it up on the site and distribute it for free. Because of this, we are limited to focusing our view on upcoming artists that are happy for us to post their tracks.

The Kollection is pro-copyright, and I am very careful about the music we post. It can be frustrating watching other blogs post really good tracks that I know are going to be taken down within a week or two, but in the end it’s going to be best for our business and our professional reputation in the music blog world.

4. If you have a problem with something specific that we’re doing, I’m fine with you addressing that. For you to criticize The Kollection as a whole is out of the question. Either don’t visit the site or send me an email. I’m a pretty friendly guy and I’m happy to email you back in response to any concerns you might have. Putting a vulgar and offensive message on our public Facebook wall is not the way to do business with anyone.

If there’s anything you should take away from this message:

The Kollection is the most professional music blog in our niche. I don’t have time to be dealing with people who lack any level of respect for our team, the thousands of hours we put into this project, or the music that we post. We represent upcoming artists and musicians who give away their music for free, which means that sometimes we can’t post the hottest new tracks from the major names. Finally, as you go down the road of your life, think about the way that you are dealing with problems. Emailing me would have been 100 times more efficient than publicly insulting The Kollection. Nobody in the professional world will ever take you seriously with your attitude or approach to human communication.

It can get discouraging at times when I see other blogs consistently pushing out 10+ songs per day, considering The Kollection averages 4-5 (across the network). Then I go through and listen to what other websites are posting and come to this realization:

Quality over quantity will win every time.

I know that 99% of kollectors out there visit us because they appreciate our exclusivity, selection, and willingness to not post a song despite the name behind it.

During the first week of 2011, I posted a poll for everyone to vote on what they’d like to see from The Kollection in the new year. Below are the results:

It’s now April 11th, just over 1/3 of the way through the year, and I’m excited to look back and see our progress. Here’s some of our recent achievements:

More daily music – The Kollection has posted over 200 songs across all site branches in the last month. That’s 200 songs available for free, that have been listened to and downloaded by people all over the world. This is all thanks to our incredible team of Kollection authors who put in the time and energy to supply the world with unheard music, music for the rest of us.

Instant downloads – It’s been just over a month since we implemented our new Soundcloud players which not only help all our tracks buffer faster, but also allowed us to implement instant downloading. No more Hulkshare, Mediafire, or other ad-infested crap sites that might have previously made the kollecting experience less than amazing.

Playlist – While this feature is still in its infancy, we do have running playlists for each branch of The Kollection here. Although they are simple, I’m happy to finally have a way for kollectors to get a continuous stream of all our posts, without having to dig back through the site and load up new pages. Expect more development in this area.

Shirts – In January we launched Kollection Apparel Volume 2. With four colors, four designs, and girls v-necks, this has been a huge stepping stone in The Kollection’s growth. Our apparel is extremely high quality, made on the finest American Apparel shirts, with custom prints on the front, back, and inside tag. I’m extremely proud of Volume 2.

On top of these shirts, we also recently announced preorders for our summer lineup of Kollection Tanks. I’m really excited to have these in, and the preorder response has been fantastic!

It’s funny – people assume that we make tons of profit off all our apparel. Once you factor in the time investment, cost of storage, organization, shipping, inventory, and design work, we’re working at sub-minimum wage. These shirts, for now, aren’t meant to be making us tons of cash to float on – instead they are simply a way for Kollectors to support our mission and rock some comfortable new gear.

Quick thank you to the hundreds of you out there that are rocking Kollection Apparel – your support keeps this alive!

Hats – On January 30th, preorders opened for our first line of Kollection Hats. I have personally never worked with hat production before, so this has been quite the learning experience. We’ve been maintaining contact with everyone that preordered a hat, letting them know the progress as the hats have been made and shipped. Right now, I expect to have these in the mail by late April or early May!

So what’s next?

Complacency breeds mediocrity, something I do not allow at The Kollection. I recognize that we’ve made huge leaps in bounds over the past few months, but it’s no excuse to sit back and relax. Every day I’m shipping shirts, posting new songs, sorting through submissions, working on the new site design, prepping new apparel orders, responding to dozens of emails, and keeping up with our users on Twitter and Facebook.

Right now my goals are as follows:

• Launch a professional and fully-independent Kollection app. This will be huge, but I’m going to make sure it’s done right the first time. No time frame.
• Redesign the site. The Kollection is the best organized and most professionally designed music blog in the college music niche. Period. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect – in fact, it’s far from that. I’m working on streamlining the site, making branch-sites integration cleaner and more effective, upgrading the aesthetics, and improving the way users interact with songs and media. I have lots of big plans for future site features, no specific time frame for launch at the moment.
• I would like to improve organization and unity among the branches of The Kollection. This only means small tweaks here and there, but our success is in the details, and I believe that kollectors notice all the small things we do. It’s important to me that The Kollection is as easy to use, and fun to use, as possible.
• I’m making The Kollection faster, smarter, stronger. I want to increase loading speeds and response time for every user. I’ve run several tests over the past months, and The Kollection is the fastest music blog in our niche. But that doesn’t mean I’m stopping – there are still a dozen ways to make the site run smoother and more efficiently so that you, loyal kollectors, can enjoy your music even more.

Conclusion

That’s everything on my mind at the moment. I believe in growth, evolution, and progress, and I am working every day with my amazing team to make The Kollection an essential asset in the daily lives of tens of thousands of people.

Music for the rest of us – that’s what this is all about, what it will always be about, and I will work to make sure that there isn’t a day that goes by where we don’t support the hard work of talented musicians, working as hard as us to make a name for themselves.

Kollect on…

I think yesterday may have been one of the most interesting days in recent Kollection history. Conveying sarcasm online to thousands of people that you’ve never met can be pretty tough, but I thought I’d give it a try anyways and publish two joke posts: I Hate College by Sam Adams and this video.

I guess I didn’t know what to expect, but the comments pouring in ranged from funny, to confused, to outright hateful. There were even a few comments so spiteful I didn’t have the heart to publish them for the world to see – and that’s saying a lot.

Here’s a few of the funnier comments. It’s hard to tell who is trolling who, so I took everything light-heartedly.

Are you honestly kidding me. The kollection has been slacking hard lately and this kills it for me. I’ve been coming here for almost a year and you post THIS. NOW? Thank you for aiding my decision to never come back.

and

Ive had this song for at least a year. This song was dropped before everyone knew who Sam Adams was. Im sure this was never a option for party records it was just some of his early work.

and this one really confused me:

Wow! The facebook posts Brian made today and the songs he posted today have made me lose an incredible amount of respect for the Kollection. This is supposed to be a fun site. Becuase music is fun. And the fact that the last two songs he posted aren’t April Fool’s jokes are pathetic.

Maybe it didn’t help that on our Facebook page I published this little status:

Websites that do April Fools day pranks are jokes…

This, my friends, is sarcasm.

To everyone that didn’t catch on to the jokes yesterday – don’t worry. Now you know that we’re probably one of the most sarcastic bunches you’ll meet. If you knew what was up and (hopefully) thought the joke posts were entertaining, congrats.

That’s all for now. Until next year, kollect on…

Everyone, I have an announcement. This will come as a tragedy to most of you, I’m sure, but please bear with me in this time of hardship. It is with endurance and courage that we will make it through this.

Here we go…

Recently, a “rapper” who shall remain anonymous, submitted to The Kollection a college “rap” remix of Rebecca Black’s Friday. If you don’t know what this is, praise your lucky stars. If you do, I’m sure a lone tear just escaped your watery eye. Hold it together.

I’m not sure what else to say. When I first heard the “song” I knew, simply knew, that I had to blog about it. Honestly, it made me lose faith. I try so hard, day in and day out, to showcase new and emerging good music to the world. And then this. This. So here I am, blogging through teary eyes…it’s been a fun ride everyone. I’m not sure where the road goes from here…

Kollect on…