We've got some winners. Judging is complete for
Noteflight's Summer Starshine Composition Contest, and we were really
floored by the quality of the entries! The top results are as follows:
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Survey results: Who's using Noteflight?
We made a big deal last month about our user survey, because we
wanted to understand more about the people who use our service.
We found out a lot, and we want to share some of this
information: after all, it's about you! Here are some facts
and figures that we think are interesting:
What are our plans for the business? Many of you have asked how we can sustain a free service like Noteflight. Our intent when releasing the service was to build a strong and vibrant community by making easy-to-use music notation software available to everyone. That's why we don't charge and why it is so important the product be available on any browser, anywhere. By removing barriers to usage, we are able to build a community that includes many who may have been shut out by for-fee or desktop-based software. The last year has been about understanding our community, actively responding to your feedback and building a better and better product. Your response has been invaluable and has let us know that we offer a valuable service. Thankfully, people want us to stick around -- and we intend to, so we'd like to say a little bit about what we're thinking. First of all, let's acknowledge the obvious: we do need to generate revenue in order to grow and improve the service. To date, our team has been building, operating and supporting the service using our own time and our own financial resources. We've done this out of our passion and commitment to the Noteflight vision - making it far easier for musicians, teachers, students, and hobbyists to freely create and access music from any connected device. The current functionality achieves this, but is only the beginning of something more exciting. To generate the revenue necessary to achieve this vision, we will be announcing paid models that reflect specific types of users and usage. Rest assured, however: even as we roll out these models, we are committed to continuing to provide a free service with a rich set of features that do not stifle your creativity. We are passionate about Noteflight being accessible to anyone who wants to use it and all of our business decisions are guided by three principles: Community, Access, and Respect. We're building and nurturing a community of people who are trying to do something together -- create and share music online -- and, like any community, Noteflight and its users have responsibilities to one another. One of our primary responsibilities is to provide access: people need to be able to easily join our community and participate at the level that is right for them. And the entire community has the responsibility to show respect: Noteflight is committed to understanding and responding to our users' needs, and the entire community is responsible for showing respect by listening to each other and supporting each other as best we can. As we move forward, we are going to generate revenue while preserving access to our community and treating our users respectfully. The first step in defining new product packages is to identify those areas where we deliver specific value to a segment of users. In those areas, it makes sense that those specific users or organizations can pay appropriately for that value. (In fact, this isn't a new concept for us: we already have a growing number of paying customers for our educational version, Noteflight Learning Edition.) And for you, our early adopters, we recognize and appreciate your support and will offer many options that ensure that any change affects you as little as possible. There's one final aspect of respect we want to mention: good communication. There are no sudden surprises ahead. We will actively garner your feedback on our proposed plans and will communicate openly as we move forward. This includes allowing plenty of lead time before we institute a new policy, comprehensive FAQs for understanding how changes affect the community, and clear channels to ask questions or offer comments. We will be enhancing the product line but these changes will always be guided by our underlying principles. What have we done for you lately? Well, a few things, as it happens! We have at last introduced MIDI import, which opens up a huge space for music to be brought into Noteflight from the most popular single musical file format. MIDI import is a complex and difficult matter, but we feel good about our initial version of the feature and will be continuing to improve it over time. We've also started delivering our large data files to your web browser using a content distribution network. This is a a commercial network of web servers strategically located all over the world; in our case, they are operated by Amazon.com (a slightly larger operation than Noteflight!) . All the instrument files and program code for the Noteflight Score Editor are now sent to you from the server closest to you on the Internet, which should improve download times dramatically for some users. Next up: score comments, user "favorites" and more! Talk to us. Please tell us about how you're using Noteflight to collaborate and share music with others, so we can let everyone know about your ideas and experiences in future newsletters. Send us an email at: info@noteflight.com. Nowadays, you can communicate with us via Facebook and Twitter too! |