March 25, 2010 – 10:15 am
Like this, but a blog
A disclaimer about today’s idea: I’m on the board of advisors for Bandcamp, and I think it’s bloody brilliant. If you make music, and you’re not using it – you should get onto that.
Actually, today’s idea is not for Bandcamp, as it might seem – but for WordPress. What I’m proposing is a WP template with added cleverness. I’ve mentioned this to a few people before, but it hasn’t eventuated, so I’m posing it here as today’s idea.
So the gist is that you’d set up your WordPress account, install the template, and then just type your Bandcamp URL into the settings.
The template grabs the correct CSS code, it makes the background the same, the width the same, the font the same and the header the same.
Idiotproof band websites
So the idea is, because Bandcamp just works, it looks nice and it’s easy to use – why not make your whole music website look, feel and work like that?
With the WP Bandcampify template, it would look like its all part of the same thing – but it’s a WordPress site dressed up as a Bandcamp site. You can then have as many pages as you like, maintain a blog and when you click on the music page – there’s your music over at Bandcamp – but it feels like you haven’t moved.
You can do all the necessary trickiness with Widgets – and maybe even auto-embed a Bandcamp player widget in the sidebar. There are lots of options – but the key to this is make it as un-screwuppable as possible.
It seems like the last piece of the puzzle
Because you can already use custom URLs on Bandcamp, the web address can be the same. If your website’s at myband.com your Bandcamp page can be at music.myband.com.
And with the new image maps and even newer index page, the whole thing can be pretty much seamlessly integrated.
All we need for this to work is for someone with WP smarts to code the WP template with the extra cleverness in it – and then we could have a universe of bands whose whole web presence looks as lovely as their Bandcamp sites… even if their links are all pink (I’m looking at you, Peter…).
Are you that clever WP person?
Table of contents for 30 Days of Ideas
- The other way of following first
- Now we’re up and dancing
- 30 days of ideas – 01: Keymash
- 30 days of ideas – 02: Radio Alerts
- 30 days of ideas – 03: Only Famous (a romantic comedy)
- 30 days of ideas – 04: Modcasts
- 30 days of ideas – 05: Numberless Calendar
- 30 days of ideas – 06: SpringCleanr
- 30 days of ideas – 07: Street Gallery
- 30 days of ideas – 08: Smart Business Cards
- 30 days of ideas – 09: Recordings in Concert
- 30 days of ideas – 10: Vinyl scanner
- 30 days of ideas – 11: Photo Stack-and-Scan
- 30 days of ideas – 12: A Box of Cool
- 30 days of ideas – 13: Karaoke-Tube Celebstar Idol
- 30 days of ideas – 14: I Made You A Tape
- 30 days of ideas – 15: Newspaper download codes
- 30 days of ideas – 16: Pebble Splash
- 30 days of ideas – 17: Digital radio, somewhere useful
- 30 days of ideas – 18: Public domain music collection
- 30 days of ideas – 19: Blog cast-list automator
- 30 days of ideas – 20: The Retirement Pile
- 30 days of ideas – 21: Nationalise EMI
- 30 days of ideas – 22: The Stainless Steel Rat (the movie)
- 30 days of ideas – 23: WordPress Bandcampify template
- 30 days of ideas – 24: Rollercoasters as public transport
- 30 days of ideas – 25: Next-gen personalised music radio
- 30 days of ideas – 26: New Music Trust
- 30 days of ideas – 27: Tamagotchi Gardening
- 30 days of ideas – 28: Charity shop clothing subscription
- 30 days of ideas – 29: ‘Now Playing’ social music app
- 30 days of ideas – 30: House of Spare Ideas
- Mixtape for You by Ray Kuyvenhoven
- What can you do in 30 days?
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6 Comments
That’s very clever. It limits your design options a little, but that’s probably a good thing for most bands.
Thanks for pointing out the index page and image map on Bandcamp. I’ll definitely be tweaking at the weekend…
If I ever get a free day or two I’ll build this for sure. Now all we need is a Bandcamp API to easily pull out the profile data. And to build a custom player that’s a bit better. Then we will all be in geek muso heaven. ;)
It’s an interesting idea. The only thing you would really need to get from the Bandcamp site yould be the colors and images. the width, font, etc are standard in Bandcamp, so they would just be part of the WP Theme.
I really think it would be more practical to simply add the same design oprions to the theme and have the user fill them out, instead of getting them from the bandcamp page automatically.
What would be really cool is if someone made a script that automatically spits out a header image and image map for your Bandcamp page, based on the header and menu you have on your site.
I’m amazed when I come across musicians who still don’t have a Bandcamp page. It really is the best option out there for releasing music. I like this WP idea simply because I’m all for any further integration of bandcamp with your own website.
I’d like to chat with someone about this – is there a profile API to get this info?
A simpler way might be to just paste the player embed code into a wordpress page so you have the common look and feel of your own site.
Check out somebody doing exactly this: http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-bandcamp-theme/
Looks like I’m late to the party, but I’ve actually got this working perfectly as a Thematic Child Theme. Trying to decide if I want to rebuild it as a fork of 2010. If anyone is interested in checking it out, let me know.