In the old days, you never knew which CDs the record store would have in stock. That limitation of physical media was supposed to be solved by digital. Back in the 1990s, technology evangelists and music fans alike began to talk about a “celestial jukebox” — a utopian ideal in which every song ever recorded would be available at a click. In reality, even a celestial jukebox has gaps. Or more precisely, numerous jukeboxes have come along – iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube – and each service has had gaps in its repertoire. And those gaps have been growing bigger and more complicated as artists have wielded more power in withholding their music from one outlet or another.
Source: So Much Streaming Music, Just Not in One Place – The New York Times
Additional Editorial:
Published music libraries are numerous, and have scattered artist coverage for one reason or another. Music repositories may overlap, or lack completeness of coverage.
As expressed in “As a Data Deluge Grows, Companies Rethink Storage“, creating a system similar to the Internet Domain Name System for “Information Asset Libraries” would help in numerous ways. Front end UIs may query these “Information Asset (object) libraries” to understand the availability of content across the Internet.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical decentralized naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network.
Another opportunity would be to leverage the existing DNS platform for managing these “Information Asset Repositories”
In a relatively cost restrained implementation, a DNS type effort can be taken up by the music industry. From artists to distribution channels, existing music repositories can be leveraged, and within months, a music aficionado may go to any participating platform, and search for an artist, title, album, or any other indexed meta data, and results across ‘Information Asset Repositories’ would be displayed to the user with a jump link to the registered information asset in the library.
Small independent artists need just populate a spreadsheet with rows that contain a row for each asset, and all the ‘advertised’ meta data. Their Information Asset library may be a single flat file, i.e. XML, that conforms to a basic record/row structure. The independent artist places this file on their web site, e.g. in their root folder, and informs their ISP of the address record type, and it’s location. A new DNS record specification may need to be created, e.g. MX record.
