Today we are debuting TuneTrack's new release experience across the site.
This post goes a bit into the history and thought process behind what we've built, but before you read on, click the image above to open up "You Give" by Emily Richards. Emily is giving away this album completely free (and lossless), and it makes a great example of a Full-Featured TuneTrack Release.
At ArtisTech, we've long thought that one of the biggest issues with digital music (vs. traditional mediums) is the comparative lack of metadata. Very few services even include basic credits beyond Artist/Album/Title and virtually no-one sells tracks with lyrics embedded. There really is no excuse for this, every popular compressed audio format, espescially MP3 has support for embedded meta-data, but many vendors still neglect to populate these tags.
Artwork is another area where digital music pales in comparison to it's predecessors (especially vinyl) Some retailers have made attempts to improve this situation with higher resolution artwork, and in some cases PDF artbooks, but it's still quite rare to get more than a front cover.
With these deficiencies in mind late last year we began working on an artist-focussed system of managing website content, releases and meta-data. The idea being that, as it becomes easier, and more worthwhile for artists to add Lyrics and Liner Notes; it also becomes easier for fans to find what they love.
The introduction of TuneTrack's new Release system is the first time the fruits of this labor can be enjoyed by listeners.
Lyrics and Credits for a song on TuneTrack are automatically included the Release Player, and individual track pages such as this one. But most importantly, lyrics and liner notes are written to the MP3, OGG and FLAC files available for download from TuneTrack. Likewise, album artwork is offered in the widely supported (DRM Free of course) PDF format, but like Lyrics TuneTrack takes the additional step of presenting full artwork on the web alongside the music.
We've heard iTunes and the Majors may be working on one or more new album formats that incorporate some similar elements, but they are likely to be proprietary with delayed or even outright denial of access to Indie artists. In contrast, TuneTrack leverages existing standards to deliver high quality content across a broad range of devices rather than reinventing the wheel to perpetuate single vendor/device lock-in.
Thanks for listening to my ramblings once more. Here are some more releases to check out:
