Dave Hodgkinson Music Photography

I’ve been peripherally involved in music business stuff since the mid-nineties when I started running a fan site for a certain classic rock band. In that time, I’ve watched the music business bleed itself to death through completely not understanding what was happening in the world with free access to information and their preciously generated content.

Whilst the long tail has potentially become stronger in the last few years with savvy bands being able to employ the likes of the dread Myspace and more recently the much more useful Facebook to reach out to and engage fans, the 20% who are used to taking the 80% of the revenue are suffering.

Good.

Anyhow, that isn’t the point of this post.

I’m doing some work for the BBC which involves interfacing with assorted music retailers and attempting to give them the license-payer’s business in buying the BBC’s most excellent recorded music content. What has been boggling me today has been the wide range of clue across the various providers/vendors of aforementioned musical goodness. Some examples:

• A certain large high-street music retailer has no public API. We have a spec for the format we receive but the chances of that happening in a timely manner? Remote.
• Same for Play.com, The BBC Shop (oops!), Napster and eMusic. Hmmm.
• iTunes – you’d have thunk that someone so well embedded with people with loads of money and no sense would enable the web rabble to link and make money, wouldn’t you? Fat chance. The best they can do is a “deep-link making gizmo” and an affiliate scheme with “apple-designed” stuff. Thanks guys. WE want to give YOU the business.
• Amazon – they have an API and it’s been around forever. I’m actually struggling to find documentation on their Web Services site: they’re all about the cloud these days. Still, the perl modules still work and that’s all that matters.
• Spotify – have a C client library that only runs on a specific linux. WTF? What are you people smoking?
• 7Digital have a GREAT API. Much more data than we need and some of the data we can use to enrich our database. Nice work guys.
• Musicbrainz, while not being a vendor as such, are über geeks and definitely get the API thing and are an essential part of what we’re doing so that’s useful at least.

If I’ve missed some better options with these suppliers, I’m open to suggestions of course. Still, I’m amazed that in this day and age, so many whose livelihood is going to depend on reaching out to the internet have their heads buried so deeply in the sand.

I’m sure I’ll ramble more on this as I delve deeper.