Music and the Web, with kudos to Sub Pop
So over lunch today I found myself thinking about music releases and the web. It would be incredibly handy, I was thinking, if I had a general way to see when my favorite bands release new albums. Maybe when they were on tour, too. In fact, it would be really extra‐special‐awesome if they would just export the information as a nice pretty data feed (RSS, or even better: Atom) so that I could use my favorite feed reader to keep up with my favorite bands.
Unfortunately, there’s a big problem with this idea. Musicians really suck at web design, and they don’t make enough money to hire someone who doesn’t suck at it. Traditionally the kind of information would fall nicely into the realm of the record labels, but most indie labels are only marginally more web‐savvy than their bands. Distributors could provide the information, but they’re more interested in record stores with their bulk orders than in individual consumers. And stores are much more interested in advertising their inventories than in general band information. So nobody really seems to be left to care about the information that I’m looking for, which is probably why what I’m looking for doesn’t appear to exist. I’m probably going to have to cobble it together from MusicBrainz’s web API (likely via their own libmusicbrainz).
Anyway, while I was poking around individual label sites looking for feed data, I happened to stop by Sub Pop’s site. Once I got over the shock of the monstrously evil and broken popup ad obscuring the front page, I was actually really impressed with their site. It doesn’t appear to have my holy grail of raw release data export, but it looks like it has everything short of that. It’s sensibly organized. It has tons of data about all of their artists. It has tour information and merch. It abuses Flash much less than the average media‐focused site.
On the techie side, their site uses a refreshingly intuitive URI scheme, which it appears to access in a basically RESTful fashion. It aims to use XHTML for content (though it doesn’t quite validate, unfortunately). It uses CSS (well!) for presentation, even to the point of providing a specialized stylesheet for print media. It uses JavaScript for interactive bits. It astoundingly marks up event data with hCalendar tags! It even provides sensible‐looking RSS data feeds, even if they’re not the ones I was looking for. Overall I was genuinely surprised by how good their website was compared to those of so many other labels. It wasn’t perfect (and I nearly closed the window after that grating popup), but it was hands‐down a million times better than any other indie label website I’ve ever visited. Kudos to your webdevs, Sub Pop, on the offchance that you ever stumble across this post.
(LJ Spellchecker Genius of the Day: XHTML -> STIMULI)
Unfortunately, there’s a big problem with this idea. Musicians really suck at web design, and they don’t make enough money to hire someone who doesn’t suck at it. Traditionally the kind of information would fall nicely into the realm of the record labels, but most indie labels are only marginally more web‐savvy than their bands. Distributors could provide the information, but they’re more interested in record stores with their bulk orders than in individual consumers. And stores are much more interested in advertising their inventories than in general band information. So nobody really seems to be left to care about the information that I’m looking for, which is probably why what I’m looking for doesn’t appear to exist. I’m probably going to have to cobble it together from MusicBrainz’s web API (likely via their own libmusicbrainz).
Anyway, while I was poking around individual label sites looking for feed data, I happened to stop by Sub Pop’s site. Once I got over the shock of the monstrously evil and broken popup ad obscuring the front page, I was actually really impressed with their site. It doesn’t appear to have my holy grail of raw release data export, but it looks like it has everything short of that. It’s sensibly organized. It has tons of data about all of their artists. It has tour information and merch. It abuses Flash much less than the average media‐focused site.
On the techie side, their site uses a refreshingly intuitive URI scheme, which it appears to access in a basically RESTful fashion. It aims to use XHTML for content (though it doesn’t quite validate, unfortunately). It uses CSS (well!) for presentation, even to the point of providing a specialized stylesheet for print media. It uses JavaScript for interactive bits. It astoundingly marks up event data with hCalendar tags! It even provides sensible‐looking RSS data feeds, even if they’re not the ones I was looking for. Overall I was genuinely surprised by how good their website was compared to those of so many other labels. It wasn’t perfect (and I nearly closed the window after that grating popup), but it was hands‐down a million times better than any other indie label website I’ve ever visited. Kudos to your webdevs, Sub Pop, on the offchance that you ever stumble across this post.
(LJ Spellchecker Genius of the Day: XHTML -> STIMULI)