MusiciansHUB Primer 101

Helloooo Cleveland! 

Welcome to MusiciansHUB, and our new blog. We hope to publish articles often and get lots of contributions from guest authors. We thought we'd start with a series of primers in the hopes it helps our users use our site. Our ultimate goal is to make the site simple and easy to use, but the musical universe we live in is huge and constantly changing so we thought some guidance would help. We really want your feedback, so comments are open and you can click our Feedback tab to touch base with us. We can't wait to hear from you... 

MH 101 - What is a Listing? What is a Model? How Are They Different?

Our first goal in developing this site was to provide the best music gear search on the Internet. We wanted our users to be able to find just about anything they were looking for! To accomplish this, we needed to think through what was going to happen on the site day to day. Items such as guitars, drums, microphones, synthesizers, sheet music etc... would appear then potentially disappear from the site all the time. This presented us with our first real design challenge, and is the reason for this article. Specifically, how do we deal with things that persist, aka Models and items that are transient, aka Listings?

Well a big hint lies in the question above. We separated them. MusiciansHUB in a nutshell is a huge inventory of Models. Models represent every variation of instrument, music gear and music related items we've ever found. They are persistent which means they'll always exist on the site. When we find a new model of any instrument, we add it to our catalog and keep it forever. In the music industry a model means a LOT! To a collector every slight variation in a classic like a Les Paul Sunburst guitar means a LOT! We categorize models across the entire site in the hopes it makes instruments easier to find. A good example of a model on the MusiciansHUB site is the custom Eric Clapton Fender Stratocaster in Mercedes Blue with a Maple fretboard.

So what's a Listing? 

A Listing on our site is an item that is transient. It's an item for sale and once it's sold it's gone. There is a relationship between models and listings, but I'll get to that in a second... We are regularly updating our listings from 3rd party sites and sharing them with you. Items for sale on our site come and go all the time. As soon as we're notified we add or remove listings from our site. The key idea we want you to understand is that when updates happen, listings come and go but models stay forever. Why? Because every listing is associated with a model. It's possible we have LOTS of listings for a given model. For instance, Black Stratocasters are very popular and easy to find new and used. For this model, we always have lots of listings. But for extremely rare items, listings are equally rare. We want to make it possible for buyers to track a model and be alerted when a new listing arrives. Make sense? It's our hope that users find models they like, monitor them for new listings and are able to find what they're looking for. If that happens, we're accomplishing our main goal, and that makes us very, very happy.

So what does this all mean? Most importantly it means:

1. Find a model you like.
2. Check in often or setup an alert for new listings.
3. Cry victory when you find that coveted item!

It may take a while to find the item you're looking for, but we want you to know that we're dedicated to bringing all the listings we can find together on MusiciansHUB. That's it for Lesson 1... Let us know what you think...