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I’m keeping an eye on this volcano thing. I’m due to fly back to the UK to tour manage a band for a week. The tour is now looking very precarious as members of the headline band are dotted over Europe and we’re in Asia.

• This is where the ash is blowing. Yay for animated GIF files!
• Actual scientists say it’s a bit iffy.
• A Camden nursery has had to close because slacker teachers stranded in the sun. No, they deserve it I’m sure.
• However, stranded tourists are set to be fired from a cannon.
• Iranian cleric says earthquakes are women’s fault for dressing slutty.
• PZ reminds us that an embryo is not a person. And a cracker is not the body of a dead guy.
• How homeopathy doesn’t work and the immune system does.
• What did their body language say about the two aspirant and one perspirant prime ministers?
• The Tories want to scrap HS2 and run another line to Heathrow. Hang on, isn’t there a Heathrow link in Crossrail, which they’re hotly tipped to scrap?
• The unscripted rise of Nick Clegg could lock out Murdoch. If only. No, wait. He’s nobbled YouGov.
• 80kg policeman in Taiwan smacks down a 40kg scantily clad girl. Yes, this was a one-party state under martial law until 1991. Takes a while to shake that legacy off.
• Still in Asia, a YouTube video on how to look like a cheap prostitute.
• Women are now empowered by everything they do. You go girl!
• No-one’s getting rich off Spotify.
• Weed for autism. Jenny McCarthy is missing a trick here.
• Weird urban ecosystems. Some cool ones too.

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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.

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