I want to thank Chris M Johnson again for suggesting Music Alerts to me. It does what it needs to, it gives you album release date notifications through an RSS feed, and although it works just fine there are still some issues with it.
The biggest problem with Music Alerts is it’s input method. They give you a text box to list your bands seperated by commas. But, once you input the bands there is no way to be sure that the bands were typed in correctly and there is no way of knowing that they were recognized. One of the bands I listed, “Callahan,” was instead recognized as an artist named “Bill Callahan,” not exactly what I was looking for.
Which brings me to the next problem with Music Alerts, you can’t remove bands from your feed. The only solution they have for removing a band from your feed is to copy the description tag from your old feed (which contains all of your listed artists), remove the artist you no longer wants updates for, and paste it on Music Alerts’ website to make a new feed. You can add bands to your feed but not being able to remove them is a real bummer.
The last suggestion I have is iTunes Genius style recommendations for bands that a user might be interested in, this isn’t a necessity, just icing on the cake.
Music Alerts is still better than nothing. But, I hope that they will either improve or another service becomes available that has all of the features I’m looking for.
