You will receive a confirmation e-mail with a special Sandbox password. Once you enter this password, you'll be able to see the full scope of the Indie Heaven system, and use most of its features. We won't let you send out live promo, but we'll give you a way of looking at it "as if" it had just arrived in your inbox. When you first enter the Sandbox, you will be greeted with a Guided Tour page. The most important thing to understand about Indie Heaven is, it is role based. What you see, depends on your role. The Guided Tour will let you adopt each of the six roles in turn - User, Artist, Admin, Marketing, Business Owner, and Webmaster. We highly recommend completing the Guided Tour before experimenting. For example - when you log is as an Artist, you'll see an "Artist Console" that's completely invisible to ordinary users. Remember, Indie Heaven handles a record company. When you're the business owner, you're like the chairman of Sony - you'll need to be able to fund cost centers and projects and even other companies. It's rare that the chairman of Sony would fund an Artist directly, for that purpose we have "admins" which are like Back Office personnel. (Permitted) admins can transfer funds from (permitted) cost centers to (permitted) artist accounts. They can also approve Artist expense requests, royalty payouts, and company expenses from cost centers, projects, and artists. In the Artist Console are some features that even Admins can't see, for instance an Admin can not directly withdraw money from an Artist Account (they can deposit, but they can't withdraw). And in the Artist Console are many features that Admins don't care about, like for instance promotional mailing lists, contact databases, and IP geolocation. Indie Heaven's Guided Tour will take you through each of the 6 roles, show you where the important functions are located for each role, and run some real-life scenarios so you can see how the system actually works. Thereafter, you're free to play around. We recommend spending some time with the Artist role, so you can begin to see how powerful Indie Heaven really is. As an Artist you will create promos, send out press releases, add items to your Store and monitor their sales and your revenues - you will create and book events, change the layout and content of your web site, locate and communicate with your fans, and interact with your record company in various ways. If you haven't already done so, please take a moment to register on our web site and we'll send you instructions for how to access and experiment with the Indie Heaven Sandbox. |