September 26, 2005
Online music directories
["Brad nails":http://www.bradsucks.net/archives/2005/09/26/brad-sucks-podsafe/"] some of what’s been chafing me about all these online music/artist directories. He, like me, dislikes uploading a song instead of being able to just link to it, and rightly despises the half-assed blogging “features,” favoring RSS syndication instead.
I’ll add one of my own: online gig calendars. IMO this is the biggest PITA of all these sites. Hardly any of them support any decent kind of batch uploading tool for gig dates, forcing me to use some ridiculous submission form for every single gig. Stupid. At the very least, include an option to upload a CSV file or RSS dump or something.
I’d rather these sites focus on doing just a few things really well than a whole bunch of things poorly. I’m still waiting for a service that incorporates Flickr-like tagging instead of jamming all of us into convenient little genre boxes.











I’ve been dreaming of a MySpace type service that actually just incorporated existing weblog systems somehow.
Like I store my bio and description and pictures and songs and gigs and whatever the hell else on my server and the MySpace service just aggregates all that and ties it together into a nice searchable database, letting people make connections and so on.
Or maybe if you can’t build it right into weblog systems, someone could do an intelligent, open electronic press kit with a real API that services can use.
“I’m still waiting for a service that incorporates Flickr-like tagging instead of jamming all of us into convenient little genre boxes.”
Why not make one? You got the skills…
Must… resist… urge to create… yet another site…
BTW, Musi-cal may not be an all-encompassing blog/mp3/etc. site, but it does allow batch uploads. With quirky restrictions, to be sure, but it works.
Or their “Gig Gopher” lets you post your tour dates wherever, and they pull it in (http://www.musi-cal.com/help-itinerary.html)