I thought I'd share with you what we've been talking about lately in regards to new features. While Allihoopa is a nice idea, we think there's a need in the Reason community, a void left from the good old Reasonstation.net days. I'll just outline all the ideas that I've been playing with, and have been talking with the other moderators about.
Idea 1: The Repository
In short, this is the place for sharing all your user generated content with the world. Patches, refills, cover art, you name it. On top of that, I like the idea of sharing actual reason project files, instead of just a reason project including a bounce, like Allihoopa. As outlined in this post, Rack extensions could become a problem. To me, it's not. First of all, you're able to open and playback a reason project, even if you miss some extensions. For the rest, it's self-explanatory why it's not a problem with a few suggested features:
- Reason projects can be public or private
- You can create collaborations between users. In collaborations, you can outline internal guidelines on which RE's to use
- The reason project overview (before download), will show you a list of Rack Extensions and Refills used, and provide a link to the Prop-shop to obtain them if you want. Reason does this as well
- Share your Reason projects with everyone
- Share them only with the people you collaborate with
- Share and find cover art
- Share your refills or patches
- Share your project templates
Idea 2: The Marketplace
This is where the more serious developers, refill creators, tutorial makers and template designers could sell their premium content, something that is already happening. The advantage of this would be to gather everything on the same platform. I'll keep it short. Content in this area could be:
- Refills
- Project templates
- Tutorials
I currently own a share in an aggregator service, that can publish to more or less every digital platform, except BeatPort. (So iTunes, Spotify, Tidal, etc. etc.). This could be the place, where Reason users could publish their music to the entire world. However, since there's expenses involved with each and every release, this would require one of two models. A) Subscription service, or B) A cut of music sales. However, the possibility is there, and for some, this might be an attractive feature. So an overview:
- Publish your music to nearly every digital platform
- View statements and sales statistics
No matter which idea we might go with, there's a lot of work involved. Especially with idea 1, the repository, which includes a lot of pre-study as well. However, this is personally my favorite idea, since this particular setup is currently missing.
Please let me know what you all think, and share your thoughts, ideas and suggestions with us!