David Emery OnlineArtistry
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...
Read more ➔Grooveshark Launches Awesome Streaming Music Service
You know what? This is actually pretty good, and has one of the best flash-based interfaces I’ve seen in quite a while.
Visit ➔Examining Twinkle for the iPhone
Twinkle is yet another reason to jailbreak your iPhone. At its core it’s a Twitter client, and a very good one at that, but what makes it really interesting is that if you update using Twinkle it can optionally (and by default) save your location whilst you do so, using the iPhone location APIs. You can then see a list of twitters by, say, everyone within a 1 mile radius of you, which is pretty remarkable.
More proof we’re living in the future etc…
Visit ➔Introducing CSS Gradients
WebKit now supports CSS gradients, which is pretty awesome – you can now make fully Web 2.0 compliant designs with rounded corners, gradients and drop shadows fully in CSS in WebKit. If only everyone else (looks in Firefox and IE’s directions) would implement all these features as quickly as the WebKit folks are…
Visit ➔Buzznet Acquires Music Blog Idolator from Gawker Media
I can’t help but think that Buzznet (and hence Universal) owning two of the largest music blogs is really not a good thing. Luckily for us, 10 more – just as good – will spring up to take their place.
Visit ➔Monocle: design notes
Possibly one of the longest blog posts I’ve ever read, but well worth getting through – while I’m not really a fan of Monocle’s content (a little too pretentious for my liking) the design of both the web site and the magazine is exemplary.
Visit ➔Last.fm: Free music streams turn into increased music sales
Guess what? Listening to music makes people want to buy music. Who’d have thought it?
Visit ➔Off
Right.
Screw this, I’m off to Cornwall.
See you all in a week – don’t have too much fun without me…
Read more ➔The MySpace Deal
Bob hits the nail on the head here – a year ago the MySpace music deal would have been interesting but in today’s market it’s quite pedestrian.
Visit ➔Apple passes Wal-Mart, now #1 music retailer in US
It’s pretty remarkable that a once ailing computer company can move into such an established market and completely dominate it so quickly.
Visit ➔