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