Posted on - April 22, 2008 [at] 10:37 pm by Brad
Tagged in - business, music, nerdy, news, redesign, store
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In preparation for the new album release I’ve re-vamped all the music/store sections on the site. I’ll spare you the boring tech details but it was A LOT OF WORK. Here’s some of the new stuff:
- Affected pages are music, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Remixed, Outside the Inbox and the store.
- I tried to roll buying and listening together in a non-obnoxious way. Anywhere you can listen to the albums you can also buy them and vice versa.
- Combined physical and digital buying instead of having two separate stores.
- Every album has a flash player on it now for quick listening.
- Variable prices for I Don’t Know What I’m Doing. MP3s go for any price including. CDs have a $5 minimum.
- Paid downloads come off the ultra-reliable Amazon S3 servers and free downloads come off my clunky junkbox.
- Buying a CD gets you instant access to digital downloads of that album.
- OGG format is gone, bye bye, hardly anyone bought you!
- Lossless FLAC format is gone (but might come back?) It was more popular than OGG but not by tons and the bandwidth considerations make it rough to give away for free.
There are probably plenty of bugs (please let me know) but good lord am I glad that’s over with. Did Prince have to write his own storefronts?
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8 Comments on this post
scottandrew on New music & store makeovers
April 22, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Nice work. Designing store pages is a PITA, especially when there are CDs, ZIP bundles *and* individual tracks. So freakin’ hard to organize in a way that makes any sense.
That cart is badass, BTW. Any chance of rolling that into the BSDDS?
Brad on New music & store makeovers
April 22, 2008 at 11:11 pm
The cart’s in the current version though I have a lot of updates I need to move into the code. Not sure when that’ll happen exactly.
And yeah, designing store pages is a pain. But one day I looked at the flow of my old setup and realized people had to go all over the place just to do anything. Hopefully I’m good forever now.
Just need a new website design, but bleah.
Darg on New music & store makeovers
April 23, 2008 at 8:23 am
Having a “Download All” button is really helpful, and I’m glad there’s a Flash Player on not just the homepage.
Kermit Frosch on New music & store makeovers
April 23, 2008 at 12:21 pm
It would be really cool if FLAC was available for the new Album. It least for those who pay for the download. It’s just that mp3 is sooo nineties ;-)
Brad on New music & store makeovers
April 26, 2008 at 11:49 am
Yeah, FLAC just feels like UI clutter for the majority of people but I’d definitely prefer to be giving people lossless copies.
My one idea (UI-wise) is to let the buyer choose their format after they’ve purchased it instead of before. So they could grab both MP3 and FLAC if they wanted to. I’d sort of like to separate the music from the format if you know what I mean.
Hussein Jodiyawalla on New music & store makeovers
April 27, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Hey Brad,
I’d just like to throw in that I’d really appreciate a FLAC download when I buy your next album. Hell, I’d pay CD price for that and really not bother with the disc itself – I’d only rip it anyway and then it will sit in that big dusty CD box under my bed.
In my opinion its better (more convenient, less wasteful!) than a CD – and feels like you’re getting something more valuable for your money compared to MP3s (kinda?).
I’m probably a minority though.
Hussein Jodiyawalla on New music & store makeovers
April 27, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Oh hey yeah, what Kermit said :)
Dan on New music & store makeovers
June 4, 2008 at 4:31 am
I’ll throw in another plea for FLAC purchases, especially for the new album.. Even if you charged more for FLACs to cover the bandwidth costs!