The one downside of having releases be individual posts on label blogs is that they reduce they possibilities for individual releases to have a really strong aesthetic identity. There have been some labels at certain moments in time that have done a great job creating consistent identity across multiple releases (SST in the 80s with all that art by Raymond Petitbon comes to mind), but for the most part, labels are at their best when they help the artists create releases that are coherent aesthetic universes of their own, i.e. when they work to fund great packaging that closely matches and compliments the music itself.

I’ve been thinking about doing a net label to bring together some of the great musicians I know here in Portland. I was thinking about doing individual pages for each song. The page would be mostly art. A full-size browser window is a significant portion of the size of an LP and so you can really do some lush images. Then, since each song has its own url, you can treat it like a resource, where requesting it with .mp3 appended at the end gets you the actual music file and .xspf gets you a playlist representation that has additional metadata, maybe an ATOM feed for new versions, encodings, or remixes if they came along.

Also, in my situation I have a number of individual people who tend to collaborate in different combinations. Like instead of stable bands putting out a series of albums you get: two songs by Greg and Chris, one song by Greg and Will, three songs by Chris and Will, one song by Greg, Chris, and Will, one song by Alan that Greg played slide guitar on, etc. I’ve been thinking about how to model these relationships so that you can navigate through this web of people and styles from one song to others that have some overlap, but I don’t really have a solid idea yet for how to do it. Any thoughts?