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The EFF's recent guide on DRM has garnered a lot of interest on the Internet recently. When slashdot mentioned the guide, quite a few Magnatune fans chimed in to complain that Magnatune wasn't mentioned as a DRM-free alternative. I did hear via email from quite a few outraged Magnatune customers, who said they were writing the EFF to have us included. Evidently, their emails worked!
Now, the EFF has revised their DRM guide, and put a big call-out box at the top to DRM-free music stores, with Magnatune right there. Since I admire all the other sites on the list, I'm quite pleased to be there.
This makes the page load quite a bit faster, since the "all artists" list was about 50k worth of html for every page (ouch). It also is much cleaner, so that all that you see on the right hand pane are the artist albums, and the the photo/bio. It also gave me more room to put in some additional useful context-sensitive links (the links all refer to the current artist, rather than being the same on every page). For example, the collections are much clearer this way:
I couldn't decide whether to make a paragraph of the 'also bought' links, like so:
or a simple list. I decided to go with the slightly-messier-looking (but more compact) paragraph formatting.
Now, what's really interesting are the "stats", which tell you how each album by that artist is doing in the various "top albums statistics" that you can find at http://magnatune.com/info/stats/. For example:
Notice how the stats are told in sentences, so as to minimize repeated words, and also so that the most important award is 1st (best selling all time), with the less important ones being parentheticals (best selling this week).
I frequently get complaints that people can't browse easily at Magnatune, and that they're often looking for "the best stuff". Well, the "top selling" stats have been at Magnatune for 2 years, but they're buried in the /info/ section, so this should really help people see what's selling best (or at the highest price) and thus find the most popular things. The new "collections" feature should also help people find similarly-styled music.
Also new today is a complete rewrite of the "tracks" pages, which are now called "details" instead.
The album art is now display at the top right, the total time, and release of the album are displayed. Overall, this is about 1/2 as long, and much cleaner than the old page. The URLs to these pages have changed as well, with the new ones being much shorter, and not having those spaces in the path names (which are seen as %20 in the URL).
A very small change is that the release date of an album is now displayed when you float over the play hifi/lofi/details links, as well as over the magnatune symbol next to the album:
and since people frequently ask me what albums are new at Magnatune, the home page now makes it clear:
Finally, I've added a podcasting FAQ in the /info/ section as well as a Podcasting license type when you click on "license". This is to help promote podcasting use of our music.
What was needed is something like what major labels do with their "sub labels" that only release one type of music. At the same time, I didn't want to segregate each sub-genre into its own web site, which would lose much of the cross-fertilization that makes Magnatune special.
What I decided to do is add a concept of a "collection", as in "This album is part of the 'Hard Rock' collection", with "Hard Rock" linked to a page where you can listen or go to albums that are conceptually united around this concept of "Hard Rock".
Here is what the new "collection" sentence looks like on each artist page:
You can get a list of all the collections at Magnatune from:
http://magnatune.com/collections/