Requirements for an album page

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.

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