Digital DIY and the new HolyRoarRecords.com

The new Holy Roar Records site http://holyroarrecords.com/ went live last Thursday, and I’m quite happy with that, mostly due to going travelling from Monday the 26th and needing some time to make sure things are all running smoothly, which I’m happy to say they are.  The site is by no means finished; no no, there’s plenty more it should be doing, and other things I want it to be doing.  That’s given that Alex and Ellen Holy Roar like my ideas!  But that doesn’t stop me coding things up to try out myself anyways.  It’s been a hard slog motivating myself to getting the site to this point, yes, it’s taken some time.  But now that the first version of it is out I’m happy that Holy Roar has a new place to call its own. The fun bit comes next, and that includes releasing the code I used to make it, and documenting the know-how.

The first thing I did when I left Last.fm in March of this year was to move away from London and back to my home town of Stroud. This was still less than 24 hours after some amazing friday afternoon/evening drinks that are a regular feature with all my good friends around those parts. It just happens, planning these things just doesn’t work out.  The second thing I did (on the day after that) was to go snowboarding for the very first time, and I have to say, it was superb. The point that my mind was trying to make with these abrupt decisions was that after leaving the brilliant Last.fm, what do you do? What can you do? So I decided I’d mostly just not think about it and go do something else somewhere else.

Looking back on it now it seems Stefan Sagmeister had already figured out what I was up to, but I just happened to not be at TED that year, or any other year for that matter. I was seeking to harness the power of a little time off http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time_off.html

After tinkering around with Playdar http://www.playdar.org/ and writing the first simple playlist viewing / sharing service to make use of it called Spiffdar http://spiffdar.org/, I deciding to port Playdar’s exposed HTTP API to a web app. Why? I didn’t fully understand why, but I thought it had something to do with being a musician.

Playdar http://www.playdar.org/ if you don’t know it, is a music content resolver service — run it on every computer you use, and you’ll be able to listen to all the songs you would otherwise be able to find manually by searching through all your computers, hard disks, online services, and more. It was created by Audioscrobbler founder RJ http://www.metabrew.com/, and fellow Last.fm alumni.  Another friend and Last.fm alumni James Wheare http://james.wheare.org/ has also created http://www.playlick.com/ which is similar to Spiffdar, but better in all respects.

So, back to this web app port of the Playdar API, what was it for? Well, more importantly, what does it do?  Exposing the Playdar API to a website basically means the website can request to play music the server has access to somehow. So the obvious answer to its purpose for me was for it to act as the audio streaming server for a musician’s very own website, or possibly for an entire label.  This is an obvious choice for me since it’s along the lines towards exactly what I’ve been pushing for so passionately for the past few years; sometimes internally at Last.fm, but most of the time while in the Prince Arthur (the local pub right outside the Last.fm office).  It boils down to Artists and Labels having too much choice over where to put their music and where to call home on the web; so how about having your own site, and you can host it all over there yourself. It’s really not that hard nowadays! Let’s call it Digital DIY.

The essence of Digital DIY is that you not wrap your home on the web inside that of another.  You create your very own destination. Somewhere personal. Somewhere unique. Where you live, where you store things, and hopefully where both your fans and other 3rd parties can come to find more about what you’re up to. This is my holy grail. Anybody wanna help me find it?

Around this same time I agreed to update my friends’ label website to allow fans to buy mp3s and have them available to download.  I wanted to overhaul the site anyway, having neglected it for quite some time due to other commitments, namely having a full-time web development job that also involved music, but this was definitely more possible now, considering my choice of unemployment.  At this point I also already had the means to serve up the music, so merged the two projects and ended up building on it from there.

So why did they want an mp3 store anyway? Can’t they use iTunes, can’t they use 7digital? can’t they use both of these and much much more? Well sure they can, and they do. Their distribution channels already push to many services such as these. But isn’t this enough? No, I don’t think it is.  Why do they even have their own domain and their own website at all? Aren’t they happy putting up with only having a MySpace page, a Last.fm page, a PureVolume page, a Facebook page, a Twitter profile, and a blog on Blogger? No, I guess not.  What it seems like they were looking for is a place they can call their own.

Examples of this can be seen all over the place.  It’s easy!  So why hasn’t it been made even easier?  Well the plan following the aforementioned release of the updated http://holyroarrecords.com/ is to not only keep maintaining it, improving it, and building ontop of it… it’s to give away the code so that you can do the same.  I’m going to be working on cleaning up a lot of the code and abstracting out a large chunk of it, at which point hopefully we’ll be at a state in-which this code is releasable.  Download it, host it, customise it.

I can’t say when that’ll be, but that’s the plan.

What I can talk about with ease though is what other things the code does that isn’t obvious when you browse around the site.  As well as maintaining a catalogue of artists, albums, and tracks, it enables access to it, and not just for itself.  By reimplementing a similar API to that of Playdar that I spoke about before (the original set of code I wrote for the site), and stealing the idea of using script includes to get over cross domain scripting issues, I can pull in songs from the Holy Roar site directly into this website! Granted they are only low quality mp3s that will stream, they are trying to run a business selling high quality versions over there you know! ;p But I don’t think it’s hard to see that adding the ability to openly embed the music hosted on a site into another is a great tool to promote yourself, and eventually pull more people back to the original source of the material. Your website.

Here’s a demo of this in action that allows you to listen to 3 brilliant tracks by 3 incredible bands, here… on my blog, without me resorting to hosting mp3s illegally.  Once you’ve listened to them you should buy them over where they came from, on http://holyroarrecords.com/