Most people might not recognize the name Justin Kan at first glance, but I’m sure that more than a fair few recognize the product he brought into the mainstream and then proceeded to sell for just a shade under $1 billion – Twitch.TV.
While Justin has maintained his interest in working around tech-based starts ups, his latest few projects have seen him delve into the world of electronic music. After starting TheDrop, a user-curated Reddit style forum for electronic music, Justin has moved on to the world of download gates by creating The Artist Union – a download gate geared more towards emerging artists to connect directly with their fans.
Branding itself as the most “artist friendly” in terms of accessibility when compared with the alternatives, The Artist Union boasts a whole ton of fan-friendly features including Facebook/Spotify support as well as customizable fan interactions for download unlocks, with setup requiring minimal effort on the artist’s end. Yet, the feature that is making the most waves from artists and casual SoundCloud users alike is the SoundCloud Powerscore.
Think of your powerscore as the SoundCloud version of your Klout score, an objective score that takes into account an artist’s followers, their engagement with that artist’s tracks via favorites and reposts and also the reach of the artist’s followers. The SoundCloud Powerscore ranks the artist on a scale from 1 to 100 and provides a percentile ranking so that you can get a sense of where you stand versus other producers on SoundCloud. Artists also get valuable information such as top and median follower influence, favorites ratio (to measure engagement) and most importantly, their most influential followers for the ultimate bragging rights.
If you’re interested in checking your own SoundCloud Powerscore without having to sign up for The Artist Union, you can do so at this link.
In addition to the Powerscore feature, The Artist Union boasts a tool known as “Inner Circle,” which allows users to directly connect with their closest fans. Fans signing up for your Inner Circle will automatically favourite and repost any of your tracks in exchange for an automated download link saving them all the trouble of having to jump through the hoops. In addition, they’ve also just added Facebook/YouTube support to allow you to upload videos to those media forms with just one click.
If you’re in the market for a new download gate be sure to head on down to their official site to take a look around, and at the very least check out your Powerscore!
