music-examples

Music Examples

An attempt to gather together examples of pages describing, linking to, or referring to music.

Participants

• Rod Begbie
• Dean Hudson, Sub Pop Records

Introduction

Examples of what people actually publish on the Web when discussing, linking to and referring to musical artists and their works. This is focused predominantly on the descriptions of artists and their releases. Track information is better covered in the more general media-info-examples.

For the purposes of this discussion "artist" refers to the performing artist. That is, the individual or group that performed on a particular sound recording rather than the writer or composer of a song (in many cases, they're one in the same). This distinction has to do with the association between performers and particular sound recordings and the nuts and bolts of music copyright-- it's in no way an assertion about the definition of artistry.

Releases refer to collections sound recordings that are packaged together and made available together. Singles, EPs and albums would all be releases.

Emphasis on Practical, Simple, and Minimal

Since all previous known attempts at this problem area have ended up quite complex and over-designed, this attempt will place simplicity and minimalism first and foremost.

Thus for now, this document is deliberately restricted to examples that are:

• Actual examples in practice on the Web with URLs to the originals (note, all *-examples pages should be like this, but previous attempts at documenting media info examples have mostly ignored this requirement, and thus it is necessary to be explicit).
• Representative of very common publishing behavior on the Web. This focus on common, representative examples is essential. If possible, include an estimate of the number of similar examples. E.g. ~10k.
• Simple and minimalist. As simple as possible. Go read the microformats principles right now before proceeding any further.

Any examples added which do not conform to these requirements will be deleted.

Any generic analysis will also be deleted. Analysis before examples is premature. Once there are sufficient media-info-examples, and hopefully a simple/clean listing of media-info-formats, we'll hopefully start a media-info-brainstorming page to do aggregate analysis of the examples.

Real World Examples

Commerce Sites

• TODO: Links to Amazon, buy.com, etc.

Music Journalism

• TODO: Links to NME, Rolling Stone, Paste, Q, Pitchfork
• TODO: Links to collaborative music review sites

Artist pages

Particularly, pages which provide information about performing artists.

• Official artist sites:
  • The Shins Official Site Bio page-- lifted from allmusic.com
  • Band of Horses Official Site
• Artist pages on label sites:
  • The Shins on subpop.com
  • A pass at the mark-up of the future for subpop.com artist pages (sorry, no stylesheet)
  • Cat Power on matadorrecords.com
  • Dangerdoom on epitaph.com
  • Arcade Fire on mergerecords.com
• Unofficial fan-run artist pages (TODO)
• Links to artists' myspace/tagworld/imeem pages:
  • The Shins on MySpace
  • The Trashies on MySpace
  • Band of Horses on TagWorld
  • Scanners' on Imeem
• Other high-traffic, non-artist run sites (AMG, last.fm, VH1.com, eMusic):
  • The Shins last.fm page
  • Beatles on AllMusic
  • Ornette Coleman on eMusic
  • Black Sabbath on VH1.com
• Music Journalism Artist Features
  • Spin.com Artist of the day

Record Label pages

Label sites (like many artist sites) tend to not be the best examples of minimal, semantic mark up. They are, nonetheless, important and prevalent enough to list.

• Major label homepages
  • Atlantic Records
  • Interscope Records
  • Sony Records Pretty much all of the Sony sub-labels (Epic, Sony Nashville, etc.) use the same template with differing content.
  • BMG Classics
  • Universal Motown
• Independent record labels:
  • Sub Pop Records
  • Matador Records
  • Epitaph Records
  • Merge Records
  • Barsuk Records
  • Suicide Squeeze Records

Release Sites

Pages and/or small sites devoted to a specific release by an artist. These generally include release descriptions, track listings and album art. They may have links to downloadable or streamable media as well. Another note: artist bios are, in some cases, release specific-- from a label perspective they are often re-written every time an active artist has a new major release.

• Release sites created by record labels:
  • Rogue Wave, Descended Like Vultures
  • Kinski, Alpine Static
  • Fruit Bats, Spelled in Bones
  • Mudhoney, Under A Billion Suns
• Release pages on label sites:
  • Cansei de Ser Sexy release page on subpop.com
  • Pick a Bigger Weapon release page on epitaph.com

Music database sites

• TODO: Musicbrainz, AMG, Muse, etc.

Social sites

• TODO: Last.fm, Myspace, LiveJournal?
• WikiMusicGuide