I’m sure many of you have this problem, you are bored sitting at home one day and decide to look up a band that you haven’t heard from in a while. You go to their website or do some web searches and find out that they released an album 6 months earlier that you didn’t know existed. Obviously the next course of action is to go listen to it (by any means necessary).
But then, some of you might have thought, “that their must be a solution to this problem,” I know I have. No, I’m not releasing any new web service, and no, I’m not pointing you to one that exists, because to my knowledge this doesn’t exist. But, it should.
I want a web service that I can sign up for, and all I have to do is tell it what bands I’m interested in and it spits out an RSS feed or an email subscription sign up form. The only items that appear in that RSS feed are announcements for when new albums by your favorite bands get have release dates, and you will also receive an item in that feed on the day the album is released.
The RSS feed would be automatically created for you and will only show you albums by bands you are interested in. You could remove or add bands whenever you want and that change would be reflected in the RSS feed. It’s that simple, and I ask that if anyone decides to makes this, go ahead, just let me know about it.
In regards to this service, the question on all of the business blogs would be “what about the business model?”
I’ve already thought about that (although not for very long, since I’m not actually building the service), the links in the RSS feed would have affiliate codes in them pointing to Amazon, so the service would get a kickback on each album sold through those links (maybe they could even use affiliate links for iTunes as well). And, of course they could also go the route of charging record labels for advertisement space on their website to push new album releases.
I am really only writing about this because I want this service to exist, I love listening to music and would like to keep track of when new albums are released but don’t want all the crap that comes in bands RSS feeds and email newsletters. All I want to know is that a new album is coming out and to be reminded the day it comes out.
Update 4/23/09: Chris M Johnson has Music Alerts in the comments. I haven’t had enough time with it to be sure it is exactly what I want but it looks incredibly promising. I’ll let you all know how it goes in a few weeks.
