Shopkeepers - Open Your Doors · Aug 3, 12:24 PM

Why more download stores need APIs

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a website where you could search for the name of a track and it would tell you which download stores it’s available in? If the trend is going to shift away from people downloading music illegally and towards people buying music, surely people should know where they can buy it and be able to compare prices. Where is the confused.com for the online music stores? Can people easily find your music for sale? Download stores do a lot of work to build up their catalogs but do they do enough to make that music easily accessible to the public? Well the short answer is: Some do, but most don’t.

Online stores have tried to emulate their bricks-and-mortar predecessors by offering a shop-like experience (shopping-cart, recommendations, other people liked.. etc) because these are familiar concepts to those of us that used to visit record shops, but things have changed a lot recently. Physical record shops are closing (or already closed) and people are using the web differently to how they were a few years ago. How many younger consumers of online music have ever set foot in a record shop?

Not so long ago, finding a location or getting from A to B involved dusting off a paper map and grappling with its impossible folds. Now, if a business wants you to know where they are, they can just embed a Google Map into their website using the Google Maps application programming interface (API). The API allows you to play around with the data, creating mash-ups, and to do all sorts of stuff with it. The map can be customised to suit the site and its users, and because Google has opened up its service in this way, it has become an almost universally used tool for websites and their users.

What does this have to do with music?

It seems that most mp3 stores have been pretty slow to pick up on this opportunity. We checked out over 30 of the biggest and best download stores and found just 6 of them with APIs. iTunes, Amazon and 7digital are three stores that do. By no coincidence, they are the three stores that come up in the “download track” list on last.fm. Blip.fm also use Amazon and iTunes for their “buy this track” link. Spotify have partnered up with 7digital to offer paid for downloads. This isn’t because they are the favoured stores of last.fm, blip.fm and Spotify but because it’s easy for programmers to use their data. They have opened their doors to the rest of the web.

If more download stores had APIs, new sites would soon spring up that allow consumers to find the ones that sell the track they’re looking for. Such a development would encourage competition and bring online music consumerism up to date with the rest of the web.

Google Maps, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm et al have shown that innovative and interesting ideas will be dreamed up and built by people if they are given access to the data and it seems clear that the download stores that don’t currently have them, should develop their APIs. Perhaps we’re missing something. Is there some reason why they haven’t? We don’t know. If anyone has any thoughts on that, please leave them in the comments.

Those that do

For any of you techies that fancy a play, these are the stores we found with APIs. (Do you know of another one, please comment!)

• Apple iTunes link
• Amazon link
• Rhapsody link
• 7digital link
• People’s music store link
• digital-tunes.net link

— Alex FATdrop

Comments

1. How’s that for timing?! We posted this yesterday, and read in the music press today that a new service has just been launched to compare the prices of downloads! It seems we weren’t the only people thinking about it. Surely, even more of an indication that the other stores need to follow suit.

   — Alex · Aug 4, 11:31 AM · #

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2. This isn’t new, www.MP3puzzled.com has been around for a while now offering price comparison on MP3 track and album downloads.

   — Alli Mann · Aug 12, 07:22 AM · #

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3. i´m thinking about that serachengine since 3 ys now, 2 ys ago in germany 2 guys invented such a sys, was also online for a while and than was integrated in a sys like myspace, they had a searchengine which looked up lots of shops, but didnt become famouse, dont know why not, to early for our time ?

   i talked to a businessguy about this idea of a searchengine: he said where can u make money ? most of the searchengines have deals with the donloadshops about % of sales, so if this would be a total free s-engine u can just get money for costs with banners, no %….

   with APIs also it would be possible to create a mediaplayer with a searchengine implemented, that would make sense, streaming radio & i see what track is playing and i could buy it, also i could search like you wrote

   radio nova had such a radiplayer in the early 90s, showing the track playing, the one before and the following track, nearby a link to fnac recordshop, after listening a few hours you had a bunch of good records to buy, same we could do today with mp3/wav

   the main thing is: there is too much music on, so u need some peeps you can truct for theire taste: your favorite dj, a good reviewer, magzines, friends, good prelistening like djdownload (not just 20 seconds like beatport & co !! thats a ripp-off! you wont buy a jacket and just see before just a sleeve of it & u cant give it back if u dont like it, with dld music thats unique !!)

   lots of nu things to come in the www

   feedback to this comment welcome !

   :) ssan

   — ssan · Sep 8, 06:15 PM · #

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4. compare download (link above) just lists shops in uk !! not worldwide (as a shop here in my city informed me) but a good idea anyway, which is to develope worldwide

   — scheibosan · Sep 9, 12:14 PM · #

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