Music Store

I seriously want to get back into selling music. VBZ actually started out (in its earlier incarnation as The Red House Store) selling mostly music by musicians in Athens (GA), with the idea of being a place where any independent artist or musician could sell their work.

The pages for each individual artist were very non-cookie-cutter¹ and went beyond just "here's what we have for sale"; I included pages for tour dates, poster art, biographical information, complete discography (including titles no longer available), and whatever information I could get from the artists. Every CD (with a few exceptions, by request) could be downloaded in its entirety in glorious Lo-Fi RealAudio, at rates suitable for streaming over a modem (this was before most people had broadband; I certainly didn't have it).

Times have changed since then, obviously. On the down side, copying of audio over the internet has become a contentious issue, and while some artists may be happy to allow free downloading of lo-fi tracks, I can no longer assume this is the case. On the upside, the software technology has improved substantially to the point where a lot of the features that I wanted to offer then would actually be fairly easy to implement -- such as artist-editable calendars with a shared database (find out where a given band is playing, or find out who is playing at your venue of choice, or what's happening in your town), user comments on individual releases, and so on -- the imagination swirls with possibilities. (2008 update: MySpace and related sites now provide many of the features I was thinking of... but there is ample room for improvement.)

Leads to Follow

I'd like to implement the best features of other online music stores and avoid their pitfalls. To begin with, I'm collecting a list of other places that sell music (and/or DVDs, as I may want to offer them as well):

• Amazon: The Big One.
  • owns CDNow, which is now just a portal into Amazon
• Cheap-CDs
  • + search available CDs by song
  • - minimal user interface (or is this a plus, in some ways?)
• CD Baby: indy music - a lot of good ideas
• Allmusic: extensive musical database
• Jamendo: Creative Commons music distribution
• Indie911: looks high-budget, but seems worth further investigation

Notes

Note 1

See, for example, the following cobweb sites:

• Lisa Majersky - you can't order anything and the audio doesn't work :-(
• Rick Fowler "The Unwelcome Companion"
• Where's Anita?: redhouse.com domain was sold; information from the WA site is now here