Dave Haynes

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.