David Emery Online

Artistry

18 April 2008

On Tuesday Ethan Kaplan – VP of Technology at Warner Bros. Records – posted an interesting post on their philosophy on artist sites (which was somewhat in response to Michael Arrington’s ridiculous post about the value of music – short summary: Arrington doesn’t understand the music industry).

I thought it was pretty interesting to see the thought the goes into the artist sites that they make over at WB – I certainly agree with a whole bunch of the points, although I get the feeling that we take a slightly different tack on certain things.

As anyone who has read this blog for a while almost all of the artist sites we make are based on Textpattern, which provides a simple and light-weight framework around which we can quickly do almost anything we want with content. We still haven’t found anything better; we had a good look at Drupal – which is what WB uses – and I do quite like the idea of having a ‘platform’ that can be developed and rolled out for each site, but Drupal seemed like a massive overkill for a normal artist site (which is just a fountain of content).

The only times when Textpattern has seemed limiting is when we’ve wanted to add in more complicated social-network style features (which Textpatern doesn’t do – it’s very focused on content not interaction), but like Ethan I think – after experimenting with a couple of sites – that small social networks just don’t make sense. Sure, if you’ve got a huge fanbase then it can make sense, but you really need a critical mass of devoted users for it to make sense. That, coupled with the obvious development overheads of developing a social network (as there don’t seem to be any decent off the shelf options) mean it seems like a real waste of resources.

This also touches on the whole ambient interactivity things a well; a social network is overkill, but adding a commenting facility on things can really encourage social interactivity, as can a traditional message board (as long as it’s moderated well). While we’re on this point it’s also worth remembering that while an artist site obviously has a value above an artists MySpace, that doesn’t mean the MySpace doesn’t have a value – it performs a function quite similar to that provided for by a message board.

I’m not entirely sure what point 3 (The artist should be a user, not the site itself) is really getting at but I feel that we probably disagree – the site should be as close to being the artist’s voice as possible. The more the artist can participate the better, quite frankly – one of the reasons that radiohead.com is so successful is that it actually has members of the band blogging and posting stuff up. Fans of an artist come to an artist website to try and get more content generated by that artist – whether that’s exclusive music (which is what Kid Harpoon is doing on his site) or just writing or photos that direct connection is still very important. I think this may well have been one of the reasons that aided MySpace’s success – it has a lot of artists directly interacting with fans by posting content.

Moving on to commerce I have to say I’m still not 100% convinced on its place on an artist site. In theory it should be there, and could work really well – plenty of people will want to by direct from an artist – but the reality is that there are very few music commerce solutions that work acceptably well. It’s a sad state of affairs when most people would rather buy a CD from Amazon then an artist, but I certainly would the vast majority of the time. An artist is never going to be able to compete on things like customer service, postage pricing (most band stores are very region specific, so if you’re in a different country to them you’re going to pay through the nose for postage) and probably price (as they’re never going to make much volume) so I’m not sure if commerce is quite as important right now as maybe it could or should do. We need a better solution that allows artists to properly compete.

No flash except for media players I complexity agree with – you can make just as good an ‘experience’ with html and javascript without the overheads. I don’t think in this day and age that dial-up users are relevant – YouTube wouldn’t be so popular if it was – but mobile is getting ever more important and Flash makes even less sense there.

I’m very interested by this concept of providing an API for an artist site but I think it’s probably unnecessary. Like social networks, an API only makes sense if you’ve got a significant user base to develop things to work with it. However, the idea of opening up your data is very attractive so it’s lucky we have a good solution already: Microformats.

By adding the appropriate microformats to an artist site you can instantly open up things like tour dates, news, release information (using hAudio), links and more, and they come with a pre-built user base of developers that want to develop interesting things with them, which makes the whole a lot more interesting.

I’d be very interested to hear if you have anything you’d like to see on an artist site that is traditionally absent – I can’t help but think there’s still a lot of scope for innovation.