On February 21st of this year we sent you an urgent appeal to raise money to finance the new COVER.INFO website. Today it is now time to take stock.
Donations totaling €9,193 have been received in our association's account so far, €7,000 of which came from the editorial team. The donations of €2,193 from the user community came mostly from Germany, Austria but also from Switzerland and Belgium.
With the money we had available at the beginning of the year and all the donations, we now have just over €13,000 available for the project – and the total €17,500 needed is within reach!
We still need €4,500, so we are asking you once again to look in your wallets and send us more donations. We are so optimistic that we want to commission the start of programming at the end of May.
That is how the new site should look like:
Current draft of the new homepage (with exemplary texts)
A multi-column layout of the relationships between songs on the Song Page provides greater clarity. In this example (with fictitious dates and texts!) you can also go to the left and display the list of initial songs. The language of the songs now has a fixed place in the view.
Draft layout of the list of new entries (with fictitious data). Author information available in the database can be switched on in such list views – i. e. also in search results – so that the song page no longer needs to be opened for this.
Today we turn to you with an urgent appeal to help ensure the continued existence of our website. As many of you probably know, our website has been in existence since 1999 and has experienced ups and downs. We offer musicians, music lovers and all interested parties an infrastructure in the form of a free and generally accessible documentation of special music releases, such as cover versions, medleys, samples and music certificates, together with the corresponding originals – free of any advertising!
We are a small team of 17 music enthusiasts who have spent countless hours in our spare time for many years maintaining and completing the COVER.INFO database and generating new entries. We currently have over 640,000 songs from over 197,000 artists (artists and authors) in the database. With your contributions, you are helping to ensure that the COVER.INFO database grows by around 100 song entries every day, that errors and inaccuracies from the past can be eliminated from the database and that the standard is constantly improving.
The current website was developed in 2017/2018 and has essentially proven itself in terms of its functionality. The program code was developed at the time using the JavaScript program library React. However, the problem is that we can no longer compile the code due to further developments by the provider and some adverse circumstances, which means that we can no longer make any changes to the software.
We therefore had to decide to completely rebuild the software for the website in 2022 and, of course, to incorporate the experience we had gained since 2018. With the support of external advice and assistance, the decision was made in favor of Drupal content management system. We have found an expert for the realization of the project, which we can use for a moderate hourly rate, but the financial outlay is still very high.
As you can imagine, our financial resources are very limited, as we finance the operation of the website exclusively with the small membership fees of the association members and from donations. An appeal for donations within the editorial team raised €7,500, but we still need another €9,500 to complete the project.
One problem has become increasingly apparent in the past year: The software that went online in 2018 is now struggling to quickly process the large amount of data. In 2018 there were around 400,000 data records, currently there are over 837,000 (songs and artists). As more than 50,000 new data records are added every year, the site's performance will probably continue to slow down and it is foreseeable that at some point it will no longer be possible to operate the site in a meaningful way.
We therefore urgently need to complete the project we have already started so that we can guarantee the continued existence of the website. Please help us with your donation so that COVER.INFO can live on and continue to be available to all music lovers in the years to come. Thanks to our status as a German non-profit organization, we can issue donation receipts that can be submitted to the tax office. Every amount, no matter how small, helps!
Thank you to the members of the association and the editors!
Draft of the new front page. In the box in the middle right, our editorial team would like to recommend songs and give you some background information about them.
In the new version, the space on the desktop computer is used effectively by displaying the relationships between songs next to each other instead of below each other. Here you can see on the left the three songs on which the song “Ghetto Supastar” (right) is based. Details such as the type of relationship (cover/quote/...) still need to be added.
In the new version, it will also be possible to directly compare the details of two songs (here: the original on the left and the cover on the right). In the current version, however, you can only view the details of one song at a time.
