Album purchase links

As you know, band pages and album pages on PA have these built-in search engines for E-Bay and Amazon that display for us a lot of entries in order for us to have an easy shopping. Also, bellow the two search engines we can also find More places to buy .... music online (with links to Gemm and Doug Larson) and Buy ... & Prog Rock Digital Music online (with links to Amazon MP3 and eMusic).

Unfortunately, for many less known bands, with weak distribution, the links and the search engines can't provide actual products of that band, and prove themselves pretty useless, especially the search engines who fill the page with irrelevant results and make the page look ugly.

My suggestion is to implement the option for the users to add direct links to where the albums can be bought. I don't know how important the existing search engines and "buy" links are for PA, and I'm not suggesting to scrap them, at all. But I think that giving users the ability to add direct links (and maybe write some comments, too, like practical advice on how to buy there or what's his satisfaction with that seller) would give more accurate results and would give a real chance to small, underground bands.

What do you guys think?


Edited by harmonium.ro - June 09 2010 at 13:43

Excellent observations.

For 1., one solution would be not to admit more than one link for the same domain. However, that may be a problem when the same site sells both vinyl and CD, for example, so that's two links for the same domain. But I think it is possible to set up a system to recognize the link if it was previously submitted. I mean, I'm that it is possible,  I'm not sure if that would be easy.
2. usually webstores don't delete a product page, they only add an "out of stock" notice.

For both 2. and 3., I think that regular users can do a good monitoring for this, just like they do for duplicated albums, wrong album info or album cover, dead videos, etc. And any Special Collab could update the links based on user reports.

The built-in search links pay for the upkeep of the site and maintenance of the servers. Unsolicited links don't and would be open to spam and abuse. There is also the extra work involved in maintaining the links across 5,400 band and 28,500 album pages (validation, removal of dead links etc.)

harmonium.ro wrote: Unfortunately, for many less known bands, with weak distribution, the links and the search engines can't provide actual products of that band, and prove themselves pretty useless, especially the search engines who fill the page with irrelevant results and make the page look ugly. What do you guys think?

aginor wrote: Vompatti wrote: aginor wrote: I use (and most norwegians) use CDON.NO for bying CDs and our biggest music store Platekompaniet (Rocordcompanie)is actualy quite good on progrock, not that they have a prog section but they have all the famous and also some rare bands at farly low prices (but most KC and Genesis have shockingly high prices) Whenever I buy from CDON the guys at the post office break the CD cases. happend to me as well and when I orderd In the Glass House it took over Half a year for it arived in the mail, maybe becouse they had to import it but enyhow and then they are rude enough to send me an Late Fee bil when they are so d**mn slow to get it shipped and put to my mailbox so I dont know when it arrives. and I don't have the time to sheck the mailbox evvery day to see if it have comed (i have also a bahceleor degree to take care off)

Hey guys,

For this kind of discussion I made this thread some time ago

I can see this being nice for the smaller bands as harmonium.ro said. I think one great example would be www.progquebec.com. 

Interesting.

Nope. Can't get behind this one. Any user who can edit a link can edit in a spam / abuse. We spend enough of the day editing spam links out of the forum - to have them littered through 30,000 random archive pages is a fricking nightmare in the making. Any hacker could write a routine to do this in minutes. 

Edited by Dean - June 18 2010 at 15:33

harmonium.ro wrote: ^ But users can already edit, and they don't spam - I didn't see this point being contradicted!

harmonium.ro wrote: I see, you were stressing the free., not the advertising. So what you're saying is that no selling of prog albums should be done through PA if there's no profit for PA? I thought PA was a database, not an intermediate.