Good to see that there is some renewed discussion in the "we need a music microformat!" debate. I should mention that there has been quite a bit of "in the wild" documentation on the media-info-examples page.
We run a digital content store called bitmunk.com, which currently sells digital content for around 63,655 artists - over 848,000 songs. We are also working with the Songbird folks and have been talking about implementing a music microformat for some time. The Firefox team is interested in Microformats as well - music would be a good killer app for them... not to mention the rest of our content partners. We've convinced some of our content partners to adopt a music microformat... so, they're all waiting on one to get settled upon before they switch their websites over. >>> Have you collected any examples to inform this opinion? I should point out that the music download microformat does overlap very heavily with the media-info microformat... but more discussion should help shake things out. We collect stats on our competitors - a month or two ago we uploaded some of those stats to microformats.org - 79 online webstores, 48 of which are still in business, and only around 33 of those are accessible via non-flash/non-HTML interfaces. The data needs to be cleaned up a bit, but you can start to see some strong patterns in what most music websites list. These are the online music commerce sites that were examined: AudioFind, Telstra BigPond, Bitmunk, Download Punk, FYE, iMusic, AON Music , MSN, TDC Online, Audio Lunchbox, Chaos Music, Sony Connect, Digirama, eMusic, FNAC, Sanity, MisRolas, MTV, Musica360, Musicload, Musicmatch (Merged with Yahoo! Jukebox), MusicNet (Service Provider), AOL Music Now (Merged with Napster), Napster, Nate.com (Appears to be Korean, cannot find album examples), Next Radio (Service Provider), PartyMob, Peer Impact, Pure Tracks, Reggae Country, Real/Rhapsody, Ruckus, Sanity, Soundbuzz (Requires MS IE6), Starbucks (Requires Flash 8 player), Starzik SARL, Street CDs (parked domain name), Synacor (Service provider), Telecom Italia (Service provider), Pixbox (Terra) (Windows application), CellCity, top100.cn, Virgin Digital (merged with Napster), Virgin (Requires Windows), Wippit, Yanga Album Statistics: 100%: artist 91%: title 85%: release date 76%: label 70%: web-based purchase 64%: genre 58%: price 55%: cover image 45%: tracks 42%: track list 27%: format 24%: sample 21%: length 15%: physical-based purchase 12%: album rating 12%: summary 12%: reviews 9%: bitrate 9%: publisher 9%: number of tracks 6%: rating 6%: quality 6%: track count 6%: styles 6%: total length 6%: description 6%: long description 6%: add to wishlist 3%: SKU 3%: product id 3%: related albums 3%: regular price 3%: disc count 3%: share 3%: DRM information 3%: add to playlist 3%: price in points 3%: store price 3%: availability 3%: size 3%: album title 3%: style 3%: catalog id 3%: save to playlist 3%: subscriber price 3%: review 3%: comments 3%: catalog ID 3%: payees 3%: album 3%: production credits 3%: add bookmark 3%: UPC 3%: samples (flash) 3%: also bought 3%: total price 3%: non-subscriber price 3%: sample (flash applet) 3%: license 3%: price in credits 3%: p2p-based purchase 3%: web-based purchse 3%: savings 3%: artist rating 3%: purchase (application link) Track Statistics: 88%: title 70%: track number 70%: web-based purchase 64%: sample 64%: price 52%: length 45%: artist 18%: release date 15%: genre 12%: album 12%: format 9%: rating 9%: label 6%: composer 6%: quality 6%: size 6%: comments 6%: album title 3%: DRM information 3%: add to pop-list 3%: genres 3%: song title 3%: payees 3%: add to playlist 3%: label (popup) 3%: description 3%: add bookmark 3%: add to wishlist 3%: file type 3%: tracks 3%: bitrate 3%: total price 3%: sample (flash applet) 3%: publisher 3%: price in credits 3%: performance artist 3%: p2p-based purchase 3%: video sample 3%: web-based purchase link 3%: creators -- manu -- Manu Sporny President/CEO Digital Bazaar, Inc. http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/ _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new
