Resident Advisor mag has an interesting article on vinyl distribution. The headline is “In this age of digital downloading and digital DJing, it makes no sense for labels to release on vinyl only.”

There aren’t many millionaires in this industry. In fact, even house and techno’s most successful artists are minority interests in the wider world, comfortably outsold by moderately popular rock bands.

Indeed some of the biggest labels in the house and techno scene, the ones that seem at the very top of the tree, only sell 3,000 or so 12-inches per release. Relatively speaking, that’s miniscule. It also tells us something we should already know: that despite the endless battles about authenticity within the dance scene, it’s practically all “underground”. If one label sells 3,000 pieces of vinyl per release and another 300 per release, neither are massively successful, and neither come even close to mass popularity. The truth is, throughout the dance scene, few are making a fortune and most are merely managing, or worse.

Read on

Technorati Tags: vinyl

In addition to all the well known microformats, there also is one dedicated to audio content. On that page, it is described as follows:

It is difficult for a browser to extract semantic information about an audio recording described on a web page. Metadata such as speaker, musician, publisher, label, title of the work, release date, acquisition link, related image artwork and tags provide relevant context for the audio recording.

Having such information marked up can provide a number of benefits to the viewer. If a web browser understands that a particular web page contains a song performed by an artist, it can produce richer interactions. For example, specific searches may be performed for artists and songs via general search services such as Google and Wikipedia. Specific search services may also be queried such as MusicBrainz, The Internet Archive, FreeDB, or Bitmunk. Additionally, classification by crawlers can become more accurate. If there are 20 tracks found on a page done by the same artist, and that content consumes a significant portion of the page, it can be assumed that the page is not only about music, but also about a particular artist.

The hAudio format is based on a set of fields common to numerous audio content sites and formats in use today on the web. Where possible field names have been chosen based on those defined by the related hCard standards.

Fields

• title and/or album required. text.
• contributor. optional. using text or hCard.
• duration. optional. ISO-8601 time duration using abbr-design-pattern (re-used from hcalendar).
• item optional. using text or multiple properties from hAudio.
• position optional. text.
• category. optional. text.
• published. optional. using datetime-design-pattern.
• photo. optional. using any element containing a URL, such as IMG.
• description optional. text.
• sample (rel). optional. sample file/stream using rel-design-pattern.
• enclosure (rel). optional. full download of file using rel-enclosure.
• payment (rel). optional. link to purchase process using rel-payment.
• price. optional. using text or currency-proposal.

Technorati Tags: microformat, audio