The Latest and Greatest: A Guide to My Linkroll

This week I probed the Web for superlative music industry resources. In my search for sites that comply with IMSA Criteria, I found it to be rather difficult to gather ten well-written, structured, content rich, attractively designed websites. More often then not, it was almost inevitable to find sites infested with generic, non integrated pop-ups and advertising, which indicated that the sites were not reputable. However, I did recover ten sites throughout my inquisitive investigating that are wonderful music industry related resources that offer a variety of current news and information. The first resource I chose to cite was Apple's iTunes site. Apple, with its iTunes program, has innovated the way that people receive their music and entertainment. With a 7 year decline in physical CD sales, Apple has innovated an industry-wide change and continues to do so as the leading online distributor of music and digital entertainment. If people aren’t buying their music through iTunes, they are listening to Pandora Internet Radio. The creators of what is known as “The Music Genome Project” explain Pandora Internet Radio as, “captur(ing) the essence of music at the most fundamental level. (They) ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony.” Pandora’s simplistic functionality and interactive advertising makes for a wonderful resource I recommend to any music enthusiast. MySpace Music is another website that has revolutionized the way music is distributed. Here, users from around the world are opened up to a phenomenal music portal that has unique interactivity, decent visual design, but most notably, an endless catalogue of content. Along with the legal distribution of music, there is a growing concern amongst the industry of piracy. To police such crimes, the Recording Industry Association of America’s mission is, “to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members' (record companies) creative and financial vitality.” This site contains a vast amount of recent, up-to-date information about the ever changing legal issues of the industry. More personally however, Not Evil Music is a blog that is a free resource for all musicians, who want to learn about online music marketing, music business and the future of music industry. I can personally attest to the interactivity of this well-kept, attractive blog after receiving a response from the webmaster only a short seven hours after a post I made on an article he recently wrote. Less interactive, yet one of the better designed sites, Billboard Music Charts is a diverse music resource for industry news, but especially, it’s numerous charts that help industry professionals and other enthusiasts track who’s selling and who’s not. If the charts don’t tell all, Rolling Stone Magazine will. I find this a great website for its strong content depth which is easily accessible through its smooth structure and navigation. Similar to Apple, Clear Channel Communications is also a large corporation that has substantial influence on the music industry whose site contains a fair amount of content but particularly, its superb functionality. The last two resources I gathered, The Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame and VH1’s Save The Music, both have outstanding interactivity but could use a touch-up on their functionality since it took me marginally more time to navigate both sites.