Jay Fienberg made an open-web landing page for his (excellent) new album. I did the same not long before for my thereisonly album. I was inspired by a commercial product that cost $50 and was not quite what I wanted, CDBaby’s HearNow.
This is a common problem. It’s not so hard that it calls for investment capital. There could be an open-source version.
What should it do?
- First-time listeners should have as little friction as possible in sampling the music
- The album as a whole should be listenable in-place.
- Each song should be listenable in-place
- The promoted single should be the default
- The page is on the open web but directs listeners into streaming services
- Every track and the album as a whole should be openable in the listener’s choice of streaming service.
- Every streaming service on which the content is available should be directly linked. No other streaming services should be linked.
- There should excellent social marketing features
- Listeners should be able to leave a comment
- Listeners should be able to “Like” on the social network of their choice
- Listeners should be able to “subscribe”, for some definition of that.
- Listeners should be able to share
- Visual design should be flexible and excellent
- Album art should be shown. There should be a small inline version and a large version that can be opened.
- The markdown should be amenable to a wide range of CSS stylesheets. These stylesheets should be able to customize as much as possible. There should be a template stylesheet to be used as a default.
- Upsells should be supported
- Links and embeds to offsite commerce should be possible
- Concert tickets should be available
- The content should be durable
- The URL should be stable
- The content should be cacheable by the Internet Archive
- The streaming service links should be updateable
- Hosting must not be required
- The markup generated should be portable to host
- The markup should be generated statically, like Jekyll
- the markup should be updatable
Update April 26: Songwhip does a lot of the above. Here is the Songwhip page for there is only. Compare that to the one I made by hand at purl.org/thereisonly.
How does it compare to the requirements? The pricing page helps.