Dear members of the Overtone Music Network,
overtone.cc lives through you - through your creativity, your ideas, and your aspirations. That’s why today I’d like to ask you directly:
What would you like to see for the future of overtone.cc?
Which ideas, features, or opportunities would you wish for? What do you need to connect more effectively, share your videos and music more easily, or continue growing as an artist?
Whether it’s a small suggestion or a big vision - every piece of feedback is valuable and very welcome. Your input will help guide the next steps thoughtfully and in the spirit of our community.
You can simply reply to this message or share your thoughts directly on the platform.
Thank you for being part of this network and for actively shaping it.
Kind regards,
Jens
Replies
Dear Jens,.
First of all, thank you very much for your long-standing voluntary commitment to the overtone scene!
The website has two target groups. I'll write down what these target groups might want:
1. Creators
2. Visitors
1. Creators
want to become visible with their art and their offerings in order to ultimately gain an audience and customers. Perhaps some also want to develop further through exchange. Creators need motivation to make the effort to upload interesting content.
2. Visitors
mainly want to be entertained; less often, they are specifically looking for offers: offers to listen to or learn overtone singing. Visitors need entertainment, have a short attention span, and want to quickly find what they are looking for.
The site originally grew out of the Who's Who that I set up on my website in the late 1990s. Then Steve Sklar joined with his forum. Then you set up overtone.cc, the first interactive and international database. Back then, in the early 2000s, there was a need for it because it was difficult to find out anything about the diversity of overtone singing in one place, and Google had only just come onto the market. But knowledge acquisition has since become obsolete.
My initial ideas
1. Jens, write to the creators once a month and remind them how well the site is doing. Most of them don't know that overtone.cc actually gets tens of thousands of clicks every month. Send them ideas for what they can post.
2. Collect data on what visitors are viewing and optimize the site accordingly. I suspect that they mainly watch videos. Overtone.cc has almost 2,000 videos.
3. I suspect that a kind of expert extract from YouTube could be interesting for visitors, video collections, video playlists. Possibly with a selection of meditative playlists, curiosities, etc. Advantage for visitors: They can find information about the creators immediately and don't have to search through YouTube – similar to IMDB for movies...
4. The design could be clearer. Fewer menu items, larger font, more white space, larger video thumbnails, focus on what visitors love—e.g., videos. It must be immediately clear what can be found on the site.
5. Is there a possibility to autimatically import newly posted YouTube-Videos from registrered Creators-Accounts?
Hello Wolfgang,
thank you very much for your thoughtful, detailed, and insightful reply. I truly appreciate the time and clarity you put into it.
Your distinction between Creators and Visitors is especially valuable. It clearly highlights the need to support both: empowering creators to share their work and making it easy and engaging for visitors to discover overtone singing.
Your suggestions are concrete and inspiring. The ideas about regularly encouraging creators, learning from visitor behavior, curating video collections, simplifying the design, and integrating YouTube more directly all point toward making overtone.cc more alive, visible, and useful.
You are absolutely right about motivation — for both creators and visitors. This strongly resonates with my intention to evolve overtone.cc not just as a database, but as a living network.
Regarding implementation: I am not a programmer, so certain technical adjustments (for example larger thumbnails or structural layout changes) would require support. Perhaps there is someone in our community who would like to contribute their technical skills. Overtone has always grown through collaboration.
About the YouTube aspect: I did create a separate YouTube channel with curated playlists some years ago, but importing playlists directly into the platform is technically difficult. What I can do is, feature individual YouTube channels for a period of time (as I did it for a test with Stuart Hinds YouTube channel). However, I'm not really satisfied with the result because there are no descriptions or explanations about the channel and the videos.
Sending a monthly message to creators is definitely something I can implement — and I think this is a very good suggestion.
Thank you again, Wolfgang, for your constructive input and your continued presence in this community.
Kind regards,
Jens