If you’re new here, welcome!
I won’t tell you in this post all what official.fm is about, but in case you’re wondering, here’s a hint – official.fm is a website where content owners  (artists, labels and music media), share their music to the world. more infos here.

If you were a Fairtilizer member, don’t worry, everything will be fine, and even better than that. Simply login to the new website using your fairtilizer account and discover what we’ve been cooking for you.

Official.fm is not just Fairtilizer with a better name.
Official.fm is a better Fairtilizer.
Official.fm is hotter, faster, stronger, more open, more comfortable, cleaner, easier to use, more discoverable and introduces some cool new features.
It’s like a rebirth, a fresh new start, and a statement that things are getting really serious now.
official.fm is here to stay, and the platform on which together we’ll help build a brighter future for the music industry.

A new home for your music:

So let’s talk more about this new name and what it means for you…think about souljaboy.official.fm or edbanger.official.fm…

For artists, music professionals and companies, official.fm is the hottest url in town. For the music fan, it’s a crystal clear message: music straight from the source. Direct to fan for real.

It’s just unbelievable Olivier got such an amazing name for free. or maybe it’s just another reason why he’s the boss.
I would love to hear what the name inspector, and all the people who were having fun,  have to say about this one

A new architecture:

Tons of changes happened behind the scene, and not only bugfixes.
Fernand, our new Architect-in-Chief is not kidding when it comes to the Rails stack, and his secret goal is to build the fastest music website in the world.
We don’t always understand what he’s telling us, but what we do all understand is performance and reliability are dramatically improved!
Can you feel it? For sure you can. And you should also try to embed a player on your website!

A new design:

The new horizontal layout provides several key advantages:
- More space, more comfort.
- The website looks better on any screen size, from small netbooks to big monitors. It’s centered, and the player is always visible.
- You have more control with the new player: a very large timeline is handy to navigate, specially in a long length track.

And as far as I can judge my own work, the website is also much cleaner. At least that’s what the team tells me!  But let me know what you think.

A new navigation:

official.fm is the do it yourself music club. that’s why the most prominent part of the menu is just about you.
huge green upload button? You can’t miss it this time
Your newsfeed and dropbox are always at your fingertips,  alerting you as soon as something new happens.
We also added a convenient menu with shortlinks to the stuff that matters most: your music, your favorite music from the Official.fm world, and all your contacts.

A faster upload:

Uploading is where it all starts, and we’ve made it more convenient.
Genres are not mandatory anymore. Tags / subgenres have been seriously improved.
Private track sharing has never been easier: upload the audio, enter a title and a password. share. et voilà.

A new search:

We all knew it, search on Fairtilizer was toast.  But our CTO believed it would kill google in about 10 years when people finally understand its super power. Last time he was seen, he was building a spaceship in his garden to visit his parents on Ganymede. Oops.

We kept the old alien code just in case, but Saimon rewrote it to be a bit less “powerful” and much more understandable by today’s human beings.
It’s certainly better now: unified results, better results and better filters.

The new website is also more friendly to search engines. Expect your “official” page to quickly reach the top search results on google & co.

A new way to explore music from all over the world:

Chab is not just the mastermind behind your favorite embeddable music player, he’s also a accomplished geographer.  He mashuped his two passions and put your music on a beautiful interactive map. Since official.fm is already used by artists and labels from all over the world, the result is rather interesting.
Discover where the music production is exploding: the darker the country, the more prolific it is for a given genre.
A more traditional view shows the countries as a list you can order by name or tracks count.
You can also select a whole region, and listen to the most popular tracks from the respective charts.
Cool isn’t it? Pretty cool, eh?

Also, don’t forget to check  the new genre selector!

An easier sharing:

What artists and labels need today more than ever is to get their music heard. And even if music fans aren’t buying as much music, they’re consuming it more than ever. 
Sharing your music or the music you love has never been easier. You are just one click away from having all your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace & co to listen to and spread that super hot track or playlist.
Share from the new player, from the track list, from the track or playlist page.  Share from and to just about everywhere.

A new API:

Just a quick word on this. I’ll let the just married Ben (yeah, geeks deserve love too) talk more about his master-work in a dedicated post.
All I can tell for now is it promises very exciting new things for official.fm, making it open to any developer creativity, and not only on the web (mobile version anyone?…).
Contact Ben if you just can’t wait anymore.

A beta pro account:

We are currently testing the first features of the forthcoming pro account.

Try the new email catcher, which allows content owners to exchange a free download for a valid email.
Fair deal for the fan, and precious data for the music pro, who can build a better relationship with their audience.

We also have a tool that makes customizing your embeddable player child’s play. Pick a color, upload a logo and you’re done. And if you feel more adventurous, you can pimp just about any aspect of your player with the advanced mode.
This totally deserves another post, but you can already apply for the beta pro account program.

Phew, that’s already a mouthful, and I didn’t get to mention the rest of the new stuff and improvements!  But I let you discover this newborn babe all by yourself.
Needless to say, we’re really excited about this and the future for Official.fm, and we’re busy working on new features (I can’t wait to show you Romain’s excellent work!). Get ready for more in the coming weeks.

And If you think you have what it takes to join our team, you’re very welcome to shoot an email at jobs@official.fm.

Thank you very much for all your feedback over time.  It’s really helped us make official.fm a new and improved version of Fairtilizer, and with a kick-ass new name to boot.

We hope you enjoy the new website as much as we do, and we’d love to hear what you think about it so please keep the feedback coming!