music-examples

Music Examples

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

The Problem

What is the purpose of this exploration?

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 more aptly covered in the more general media-info-examples.

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

• TODO: Links to official artist pages
• The Shins Official Site
• Band of Horses Official Site
• Arcade Fire Official Site

• TODO: Links to unofficial fan-run artist pages
• TODO: Links to artists' myspace/tagworld pages
• TODO: Links to label artist pages
• The Shins on subpop.com
• Band of Horses on subpop.com
• A pass at the mark-up of the future for subpop.com (sorry, no stylesheet)
• Cat Power on matadorrecords.com
• Dangerdoom on epitaph.com
• Arcade Fire on mergerecords.com

Record Label pages

• TODO: Warners/Sony/BMG Homepages
• TODO: Indie label homepages
• Sub Pop Records
• Matador Records
• Epitaph Records
• Merge Records

Release Sites

• Rogue Wave, Descended Like Vultures
• Kinski, Alpine Static
• Fruit Bats, Spelled in Bones
• Mudhoney, Under A Billion Suns
• Cat Power, The Greatest

Music database sites

• TODO: Musicbrainz, AMG, Muse, etc.

Social sites

• TODO: Last.fm, Myspace, LiveJournal?