I first came to CCM IN Sept 2006 with a black mask, stripy jumper and a swag bag! I gathered up all the best goodies, and ran away into the night to twist these into samples I could use in my professional work. I thought I had to sign up to do this which is why after one year and a wander down the road to Damascuss I finally put up my first mix under the name Radiotimes and later Shelflife and after that heady taste of success there was no stopping me! (Loveshadow tried to stop me knowing my form on the now defunct Realworld Mixed site, but he had no chance when I saw what was in this Candy store!! I spit on Gabriel!!)

As a regular user I learnt the best way to Navigate the site but it did take time, so my advice is always to keep it simple. How to achieve this is another thing but obviously the search functions should be basic and quickly take the viewer to where they want to go. A little example of this is with regard to pellas. People kept asking me to upload dry stems of my vocals so I decided I would do this. I attach a dry vox to my main mix but when I go to search in the main accapela menu I cannot find it just a list of some others with no dates. So how do people find me?

Now to the meat of this post. Is it not time to advertise. The site is used by so many for so many reasons both professional and otherwise and I would have thought there would be many companies who would like to get their products seen on this site. Maybe I am wrong. Has any work been done on this to see the possible financial benefits of advertising. Have companies been contacted to see if they would advertise on CCM. Can you under the CC licences umbrella even accept commercial advertising?

I know for a long time there has been a resistance to advertising but we all live with it on thousands of sites and if controlled by the site whilst obviously a little intruding it is something we learn to live with. Nearly every Youtube video starts with an ad.

Just my thoughts on a contentious issue!

If you do start advertising can I sell one of Loveshadows discarded toupees that came my way recently!!

“Can you under the CC licences umbrella even accept commercial advertising?”

I believe this has been brought up before and the answer is no.

I am seeing all your pellas under the A Cappellas tab under the subtab All (seems to default to Featured), but I agree it could be easier. Like the ability to type an artists name into a search box under the A Cappellas tab and have all that artists pellas show. And/or having three columns on each artist’s page - mixes, samples and pellas.

Also - there’s a ‘Help Us Re-Design ccMixter’ thread under Announcements where this should probably be posted.

As far as I remember the site has been a bit rough around the edges if that’s about the UI design. But that’s what I got used to and like now. Sometimes I use google to search for samples and pells here. That is faster and quite reliable. As for the commercial issue I think it’s considered as spam and has been plaguing ccm once in a while. Usually those things get deleted quite soon.
BTW didn’t know you were Shelflife. That’s really nice to see you again. Your voice got quite deeper in few years I guess.