David Emery Online

Dear Taylor Swift

But I’m sad that your web site lets some of your most important fans — those who have special needs — down, in ways that you might not realise. Not that I blame you, you’re an artist, not a web designer or developer.

To be fair, yours isn’t the only country artist site that is inaccessible to people with disabilities. Both Shania Twain’s and Dolly Parton’s also make it either very difficult or impossible for some people to access their content. So I would like to show you how your site could be improved in small ways that would make a huge difference to a lot of people, with or without disabilities.

Always good to be reminded about these things; it amazes me, though, that people are still making nasty all-flash sites like this…

iTunes LP and iTunes Extras for Developers

Here’s everything you need to know to create a rich, interactive experience around your music and movies. All right in iTunes.

Apple have released all the specs, templates and a load of documentation for the iTunes LP format, which is nice. Skimming through them I see lots of “don’t use JS for animation, use CSS” – nice to have a HTML5 + CSS3 based platform to develop for…

The future of audio: The UK Radioplayer

It’s a really exciting development and a result of focussed, collaborative thinking within the radio industry. It’s a simple, compelling proposition for listeners, and I would welcome any comments on the project.

This looks pretty interesting – an standards-based, multi-station online radio player. Basically like the iPlayer Radio, but open to other stations. What I’d really like to know, though, is whether it’s open to people that aren’t radio stations – could Hype Machine have a station on this, for example?

Roundtable Discussion: The Role Of The Record Label

Last week, I had the opportunity to chat — and, by chat, I mean “chat via the Internet” — with a handful of independent record labels’ owners and managers. I wanted to discuss the role of the label in a time when fewer people seem to know or care what labels their favorite musicians or bands are on. Furthermore, and perhaps this has always been true, we may not even know what exactly a label does.

Interesting stuff (although – obviously – a quite US focused view on things).

Two Door Cinema Club - I Can Talk

I really like this new video by Two Door Cinema Club (and the song’s not bad too). Obviously made for the internet (as all that strobing won’t be allowed on TV) but not in a slightly-rubbish lo-fi way:

Dynamic Design

U Got The Look - JEFF the Brotherhood

JEFF the Brotherhood are a two piece (always a good start) from Nashville, Tennessee half of which used to be in the wonderful be your own PET. Half of two does indeed equal one and that one in question is Jamin who used to do the drumming duties in byoP, and is joined by his brother Jake on guitar and vocals.

They are totally my new favourite band, at least forthisweekanyway:

Google’s Music Onebox Launches, Powered By MySpace And Lala

Onebox will let users stream songs directly from Google’s search result page, and will also include additional content like tour information and music videos […] The new feature is being powered by two entirely different services: Lala, the innovative music site that lets people buy ‘web songs’ for ten cents, and iLike, the popular streaming music and artist hub that was recently acquired by MySpace.

Dear Google,

Hope all is well at Google Towers – I’m sure the revenue share you’re getting from iLike & MySpace must be a nice extra bonus on top of all your adsense cash.

I was wondering though; any chance of making it so we could populate the ‘Onebox’ content ourselves, based on putting content on musicians websites? Maybe even – and stop me if I’m talking like a crazy person – we could put it in the html (maybe in a specific format to make it easier) and you could somehow read that html, on a regular basis, and use that to populate your search results pages?

Just a thought – maybe that’s too difficult for you guys to figure out.

Anyway, keep on with the good work,

- David

The New Grooveshark: Faster, Prettier And Still Phenomenal

I’ve always considered the Grooveshark web app’s UI to be quite amazing, so I was wary when I was granted preview access to the service’s new look, which the startup is presenting publicly for the first time today (at 12 AM EST). Fortunately, they somehow managed to make it even more awesome than it already was, and the makeover was more than a new lick of paint as it also included a number of performance tweaks to make it run smoother.

You know what? The new version of Grooveshark is pretty slick; it looks very nice. However, while I was sitting through the (inevitable) loading screen and spinning beachball cursor that a flash-based app brings I was wondering: are there any popular all flash sites? Sure, you get plenty of places who use it as the way of delivering content (YouTube, MySpace etc etc) but I can’t think of any that are solely flash-based. Not one…

iTunesLP.net

At this moment these iTunes LPs are available for a select list of new releases on the iTunes store. However we think it would be nice to have many older, out-of-print, obscure albums or albums on indie-labels to get the same experience; and with that in mind we started working on finding out exactly how this new format works, in order to share our results with the community.

I thought about doing this, but low and behold someone has beaten me to it (and done a much better job, of course). Thanks internet! The iTunes LP format is quite intriguing really – we’ve now got a extremely modern web renderer built into the most popular music software, and they can interact together nicely (using a dab of Javascript) – there’s got to be some interesting things you can do with that…