I just noticed we hit 4.5 years in business (already) and I've been so focused on improving our services, I realized it's been a long time since I have blogged.  For this post, I'm just going to throw some random things I have learned and experienced in the last 4 years.

- Most new Haulix customers sign in and create a new promo within the first 15 minutes after registering with the site. No user manual required.

- Approx. 3 promo tracks are streamed for every full album downloaded each day

- Software improvement is made up of new features and more importantly, refinement, refinement and more refinement

- When you do something good, most people will praise you for it.  When you do bad, most people will give you silent treatment rather than tell you you did bad.

- There's a big difference between good customer support and outstanding customer support

- People find a happy path through software to get their work done. They tend to continue using that happy path even if there is a short-cut to do the same thing.

- Business is business. Don't let emotion influence decisions (especially when emailing)

- Customer isn't always right.  However, customer is always King.

- As Chief Manager of Haulix, I feel like there are always 5 basketballs in front of me.  My job is to keep them all spinning.

We have a new case study on the SendGrid customer website.

When we initially built the Haulix platform, we managed our own email server.  Today, Haulix customers send out over 3.6 million email invitations per year.  We needed an email solution that was more robust and one that improved deliverability.

Here's an epic article by David Lowery that explains in great detail the harm stealing music is causing artists (in response to a girl in college who publicly admitted she rarely buys any of her music).  It starts like this:

"Recently Emily White, an intern at NPR All Songs Considered and GM of what appears to be her college radio station, wrote a post on the NPR blog in which she acknowledged that while she had 11,000 songs in her music library, she’s only paid for 15 CDs in her life. Our intention is not to embarrass or shame her. We believe young people like Emily White who are fully engaged in the music scene are the artist’s biggest allies. We also believe–for reasons we’ll get into–that she has been been badly misinformed by the Free Culture movement. We only ask the opportunity to present a countervailing viewpoint."

The rest of the article can be read here...

DailyTekk compiled a great list of music industry tools for managing artists and new releases.

Haulix is listed in the Marketing & Promotion section.

http://dailytekk.com/2012/04/18/75-music-industry-tech-tools-for-artists-bands-managers-and-execs

**Thanks to Chris McConnell**

Awesome.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the importance of website advertising - it can serve as a legitimate source of income.  However, I also believe many sites are taking it way too far and not considering the user's experience.

Let's take the popular CNN.com for example. News sites are usually the type of site that one visits daily or even multiple times per day. Nothing is more annoying than going to the site and trying to COMPETE with ads that drop down. It's like the ads and your cursor both grab the scroll bar and fight to take it over. And yes, the ads usually win - even if the scrollbar hijack only lasts a few seconds.

Animated ads are okay sometimes.  Static ads with placement that is out of the way are fine.  But these huge expanding leaderboard ads are a deal breaker for me.

"My way of fighting the competition is the positive approach. Stress your own  strengths, emphasize quality, service, cleanliness, and value, and the competition will wear itself out trying to keep up."

-- Ray Kroc - Founder of McDonald's

In the past 3 years, we've seen a wide variety of things promoted through the Haulix system. Here's a brief list:

- Box Sets
- Singles
- Live Albums
- Tribute Albums
- Movie Soundtracks
- Songs Submitted For Commercials
- Songs Submitted For Video Games
- Artist DVD/Album Splits
- Book Promotion
- Streaming Teasers

It's fun to see unique ways in which customers exploit the flexible nature of our software for promotions.

Duplicate headers received from server. The response from the server contained duplicate headers. This problem is generally the result of a misconfigured website or proxy. Only the website or proxy administrator can fix this issue. Error 350 (net::ERR_RESPONSE_HEADERS_MULTIPLE_LOCATION): Multiple Location headers received. This is disallowed to protect against HTTP response splitting attacks.

Chrome did a security update recently that makes their browser adhere to web standards more "strictly." It in turn broke quite a few websites/applications out there.  If you get this error in your C# application, here is a fix:

When calling the Response's AddHeader method, make sure attachment has a semi-colon after it (instead of a comma) and put quotes around the filename.

context.Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", string.Format("attachment; filename=\"{0}.zip\"", title));