Dave Haynes

After a little more blog reader clearing today I discovered another little gem over on Rocketsurgeon’s blog called WindowShop. Beta launched by Amazon last month, it’s an immersive 3D browser-based experience that ditches the traditional text based approach to online retail. It allows the user to browse through windows made up from selections of Amazon’s music, books and videos by using the cursor keys and return key. And it’s a real delight to use. Once a window is brought into focus you are either served up with a song clip, video trailer or in the case of books, a text and audio description of the book.

The site has the feel of being more of a showcase or experiment for what is possible with an interesting interface but the overall effect is powerful and it really gets my mind racing on other applications for this approach. For example this would be a great way to browse through the latest selections on your iPhone whilst on the bus.

But one other thing struck me actually. When you’re viewing a book window it reads back the description/synopsis of the book, something that I hadn’t expected. And It was a surprising pleasure not having to churn through a load of text whilst browsing. Why isn’t there more spoken audio content on the web? Instead of reviewing a track on your music blog, read me your thoughts on it. It would be great to have music blogs in a similar style to Amazon’s WindowShop.

I’ve just been clearing out my blog reader in preparation of 2009, reading posts that I’ve flagged, weeding out some of the less interesting blogs I’m subscribed to and marking quite a lot of unread posts as read.

One post I just stumbled upon whilst doing this was a small little announcement from Digital Tunes about their new public profiles. Every user now has their own public profile with info on what artists they like, favourite labels and a purchase history. Unfortunately there isn’t an RSS feed for my purchase history but it wouldn’t be difficult to add it. And it got me thinking why doesn’t every store have this as standard. It seems like the most natural thing in the world that you’d want to be able to publish and share with others what tracks you were buying. Just like I share what music I’m listening to using Last.fm. And it’s not exactly the biggest technical challenge to implement.

I don’t actually use Digital Tunes much, I get my regular dubstep fix from Boomkat, so my profile is fairly inactive. But I really love some of the things they are doing with their site, for example see their awesome SoundCloud integration, Tunecards (using Moo) and Facebook integration. So why is it taking stores so long to innovate and implement features like these?

I hear that 7digital is building an API which could lead to some interesting things and younger startups like PeoplesMusicStore are doing some cool stuff but I’m really surprised we haven’t seen as much innovation in the digital music retail space in 2008 as we have with other digital music websites and apps.

SoundCloud was mentioned on Fred Wilson’s AVC Blog this week. Having been a big fan of Fred’s posts for over a year now it was a great pleasure to see a whole post on SoundCloud. Another great plus is the informed and heated debate that quite often develops in the comments on most of his posts.

Thanks to the awesome ‘reblog’ feature on Disqus here’s what I had to add to the conversation:

I work for SoundCloud and am out there every day talking to artists, labels, studios, producers and A&R guys etc about the service and yes they have bigger problems but they quickly realise that SoundCloud is gonna become part of their daily toolkit for doing business in the music industry.

As for the bigger picture stuff I think the killer touch here is the SoundCloud API and developer platform. I envisage more and more great applications being built around this. Just like I can import my photos from Flickr directly into a service like Animoto to create an animated music video, musicians will be able to pull their music into other services that add value. For example we’ve already seen one MP3 download store build a tool for their labels to automatically deliver music to them via SoundCloud. (http://blog.soundcloud.com/2008/11/21/digital-t…).

Another subtle but very nice feature is that SoundCloud is allowing users to markup their tracks with Creative Commons licenses. So to take my previous analogy further I can really imagine going on to a service like Animoto and pulling in my photos from Flickr and importing a CC licensed track from SoundCloud that I have previously tagged as a favourite. To me these possibilities are extremely exciting and is what the new age of the Web is all about.

Originally posted as a comment by haynes_dave on A VC using Disqus.

Go over and add your thoughts. And if Fred’s blog isn’t already in your Reader then add it now!

I was just watching this video interview with Anthony from HypeMachine whilst eating my lunch and the interviewer asked a really interesting question that I’d never actually thought about before. What was the first ever MP3 you downloaded?

I’ve thought about this and I can’t for the life of me think what it would have been or even when? I vividly remember the first ever tape, vinyl 12″ and CD I bought. I even remember where and when. But have no idea what my first MP3 was. Can you?

For the record here’s what they were:

TAPE: Jason Donavon ‘Ten Good Reasons’ album. Not too proud of that one. I was young, had a £10 Woolworths voucher and must have panicked.

CD: Jimi Hendrix ‘The Ultimate Experience’ album. 1993. Bought from WH Smiths to play on my first ever BUSH CD hi-fi system with turntable (£29.99 from Argos)

VINYL: Flytronix ‘Second Encounta’. Moving Shadow 1995. The start of what was to become a very large (and now dusty - sob) vinyl collection.