One of the wonders of the ‘tearable web’ (cf. David Jennings book, Net Blogs and Rock n Roll) is that we can put our music and video up in sharable, widgetized formats that allow them to become elements in any site that wants to help us spread the word.
So, for you bloggers, here’s a suggestion – add a Bandcamp album embed or Soundcloud widget to each post. Assuming that your blog readers are predominantly desktop readers, it’s a great way for people to discover new music while reading about a wholly unrelated subject. the player is pretty lightweight in terms of load-time, and any time soon they’ll be adding an HTML5 embed so that it’ll work on iPhone/iPad as well…
For bandcamp, all you need to do is go to the bandcamp page for any album or track, click ‘share’ and grab the embed code for your kind of blog.
You could even, if you have one album you really love, add it (via a different shaped embed – all tweakable after you’ve clicked the share button on bandcamp) to the side bar on your blog for your readers to listen to each time they come – a theme tune, if you will 🙂
It’s a great way to add interest to your blog, and become a positive link in the chain of discovery that forms this marvellous brave new world of online music.
like this:
[and if you want a list of albums that are available like this from people in some way connected with this blog, check out the bandcamp directory post and of course my own music page at http://music.stevelawson.net]
Bah, What’s wrong with auto-playing MIDI files? That’s how we did it back in the day…
hahahhahhaha – I remember those so vividly. I once had auto playing WAVs!! On a loop. unbelievable. Thought giving each page it’s own loop soundtrack was a good idea. What a buffoon 🙂
The nice thing about the Bandcamp widgets these days is that they’re all HTML 5 so they’ll play on an iPhone, iPad, etc. as well. Now the iPeople can enjoy their Steveness on the move.
at the moment, I think all the stuff on the bandcamp site is HTML5, but the external embeds are still flash… at least the code still says it’s flash and the embeds that I have are still flash… am keeping a close eye on the site for them launching the HTML5 external embeds. It’s going to be so cool 🙂
thanks for that I’ll give it ago. From time to time i add music to family video clips. It is quite easy to select (legal) music clips to add to video in youtube and in imovie BUT it would be good to get a wider choice for this type of thing.. any suggestions Martin (from DEAPPG)
Anything that’s on bandcamp is embeddable – so I guess the simple fact that someone has put it up there means they want it to be shared (especially as you’re effectively expanding their webshop, as the download link takes the person straight back to their page) – finding stuff on bandcamp can be tricky, though there are ‘tag’ pages – http://bandcamp.com/tag/ambient – change the word ‘ambient’ to anything else you like 🙂
If you want to be able to use it on your videos, then you need Creative Commons licensed works – neither bandcamp nor soundcloud seem to currently have a way to search just for CC licensed stuff (the way that Flickr does) but I’ll suggest it to both of them, as it would make them a fantastic resource for people doing videos like that…
Let me know how you get on with the embed stuff. See you soon!