LA / LBC / OC
Long Beach’s Magic Lantern have finally gone and released a new sonic document after what seemed like an eternity of waiting. Eagerly anticipated by those who have been biding their time waiting for the band to get on with their uber limited cassette only and CD-R releases (their Self-Titled CD-R was limited to 30), “High Beams”, the band’s latest opus [...]
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It’s been about six months since Peter Rojas and Downtown Records launched RCRD LBL, their digital only record label/blog hybrid. I like most other people who were curious about this venture (how could you not be, the hype was unavoidable) signed up and created a profile almost immediately, even though the features a profile offered were pretty limited. I had hoped that in time more useful features would be added, but that unfortunately hasn’t been the case.
Here are 3 features I as a fan/blogger/sharer of social media would like to see incorporated into RCRD LBL user profiles.
1. Custom playlist/mix widget – in just six months RCRD LBL has amassed quite a large catalog of music, the ability for users to take that content and create their own playlists/mixes that they could then embed elsewhere would make for a much more useful widget than some of the current offerings. It also probably wouldn’t hurt when trying to sign on new sponsors.
2. Variable height widgets – the idea behind the widgets is to get people to spread them around the web themselves, but when I just want to share one track, I don’t want to share it in a widget that is built to hold four or more tracks. It’s awkward, bulky and generally makes my site/page look funny.
3. Useful customizable rss feeds – currently the customizable rss feeds that are offered are the individual label and artist blogs, specific tags and front page news. And so far the only artists blogs that seem to get updated are those of Downtown Records artists which doesn’t offer much variety. It would be nice if each RCRD LBL post included a tag of the artist’s name in addition to the genre, that way more useful feeds could be customized by individual users.
One vast improvement RCRD LBL did just launch are the enhanced embed options for each widget, making it pretty dummy proof for users to embed them in their personal pages on most of the popular social networking sites. Though in the process of doing so they went and upped the OS requirement to Leopard on Macs for the “Dashboard” widget, a real bummer since I’m still running Tiger.