We’re coming close to being able to open our public beta: from here on out, most of what needs to be done is just tweaking interfaces and writing content. With that in mind, I’d like to start introducing what you can expect from Sawce in a series that outlines our road to launch.
One of the first things I’d like to introduce is the Sawce Widget. Its a pretty core piece of our platform, and I’ll discuss that a lot more in depth later. But as a little introduction to what we’re doing, I’ll start simple. Our widget allows users to promote songs they like on their blogs, social networking profiles, and wherever else they can express themselves online, and if other people buy songs from them, they get a revenue split with the Artist.
As you can see in the screenshot above, we offer a few variations on our widget. We actually let you pick any base color from the full light spectrum, and our rendering engine will actually calculate offset colors from that base as the core style for your widget. But it doesn’t stop there, we also allow users to personalize it even further by loading their own stylesheets straight into it as well–with no restrictions, we don’t even care if you hide our logo, our objective in this is NOT self-promotion or marketing, its about democratized music distribution.
All of this comes from the idea that music is a personal thing, and there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for distribution and monetization. Letting users express personality through style is one way that we’re working on building a really flexible platform for our users.
We think you’ll really like it, not only can you make it as pretty as you want, but we really made sure to make it as responsive as possible: there is no gooey user experience on this thing.