iMS Member Subscriptions

This is a subject I have wanted to tackle for some time. A member recently sent me a message asking about this so I thought I would clear it up. <br /><br />Is iMusicScene free or not? The answer is of course it is FREE! Memberships are not required and truthfully we do not advertise them. My guess is most people did not even know the option existed. <br /><br />This site has been free since we started it almost 4 years ago. We had subscriptions for a short time and then I removed them entirely. Recently I brought them back because some of you crazy musicians wanted to post your entire 500 song catalog on here! <br /><br />What is the difference between the subscriptions? More song and video slots is about it. The rest of the features are pretty much the same. Soundclick charges $9.95 per month for their subscriptions. That subscription will allow you to post your songs at 192k bitrate which is what all of our accounts will allow. Our subscriptions are there to just help support the site and offset our cost. If you think I am making a profit on this site, I have news for you. My taxes show otherwise. iMusicScene was never about profit. It was about having some fun and doing some music. <br /><br />So why have subscriptions at all? Well the honest truth is this. When this site first started, my shared server was around $10 a month. A shared server is many web sites sharing one small server. I have seen as many as 250 web sites on one shared server. Bandwidth and hard drive space were not an issue because there were only a handful of members here. As we got bigger, our host said we were killing the shared server and politely notified us that we were being booted from the shared server. They asked us to go to a dedicated server or find another host. Our traffic was slowing down the other 249 sites hehe. All my complaints to them about iMS running slow was being caused by us!<br /><br />A dedicated server is one that we basically owned and maintained and were the only web site on it. The price for this was $150 a month for an entry level server. We stayed on it for several months but again, our traffic continues to grow. As we grow, we have to constantly be aware of how the site interacts with our members. I work in Information Technology and I know as well as most people know, if the site is slow, who wants to be here? With that, we are constantly upgrading behind the scenes to make sure your experience here is a pleasurable one.<br /><br />The thing that cracked me up about this is Hosting Companies toss out these huge numbers to you. 200GB of Bandwidth a month and 200GB of Hard Drive space for $6 a month. Sounds great until you try and use those numbers and they are booting you from their server. Luckily we have a great host now that I can grow with and I am yet to see any major problems with them at all. <br /><br />We put the subscriptions in place for artists who need more space and want to help support iMS. Prior to the subscriptions I had people emailing me asking where they could contribute and we would politely decline.<br /><br />So yes, iMusicScene is free and will continue to be that way. The only goal we ever had was to break even. That is why we have the Yahoo Ads, MusicianFriend and Guitar Center links here. These help offset our cost. We have also been fortunate to have some web sites wanting to advertise with us. As our traffic grows, we will get more advertisers and use those proceeds to advertise iMS and help spread the word!<br /><br />I hope this clears up the question for anyone else who was wondering! <br /><br />Dazed