XSPF is the XML Shareable Playlist Format, and is designed for providing accurate metadata about music. Providing an XSPF file per-release would be pretty much the most useful API I can imagine. You might consider Creative-Commons licensing the API data, so people can spread it far and wide.

Bonus points if you include links to promotional mp3s of those songs that are available elsewhere on the website.

I’m really excited about a Sub Pop API. Next thing I know I’ll be able to roll my own Best of Sub Pop player with Yahoo Pipes and Google Gadgets.

We could do that pretty easily, I think. Would it still be as useful if it were just the metadata and wasn’t actually linking to the music?

XSPF without sound files is less useful to end users, but still powerful for web-services and music players that are capable of combining multiple data feeds (say Sub Pop’s XSPF and Last.fm’s API).

Including sound files (even only of a few promotional tracks) will allow users to build mashups directly from the Sub Pop data, without needing another source. For instance, if you provided a single XSPF playlist with all the current internet promotional tracks, someone could easily write a widget that plays a random Sub Pop song when they log into iGoogle or even Facebook.

Of course its up to the label as a whole to decided how to manage internet promotions. Providing an XSPF version of this link (http://www.subpop.com/rss/podcast) wouldn’t be a change in policy, though, just a higher-fidelity metadata source.

One important field that XSPF has which is missing from many other playlist format is the image url. If you can include images for each track, that will go a long way toward improving the appearance of SubPop music in online music players.

Hey, Dean – We’d love to participate by developing a Sub Pop channel. Very cool. We can integrate the api directly into our app and display the info in a variety of manners through the SplashCast channel.

Cool stuff. Let me know how we can give this a go.

I’d love to speak with someone about how we could integrate what you’re doing with the LimeSpot platform. Shoot me a message with contact info to jknowles@limespot.com

This is very doable (although it may take us a month or two to get around to it), as is adding image links into the metadata.

Also, (and I’m not sure if this is this is useful to anyone but it does exist) check out:

http://www.subpop.com/rss/image/

and

http://www.subpop.com/rss/image/

So, for example, http://www.subpop.com/rss/image/the_shins gets you an RSS feed with all the images we have associated with The Shins, with the file tagged with both MediaRSS and as an enclosure.

Our slugs are generally just and artist, release or post names/titles that have been lowercased, stripped of punctuation, and with underscores subbed in for spaces.

Thanks for the input—we’ll definitely put XSPF on the TODO list!

That should read:

http://www.subpop.com/rss/image/<artist slug>

and

http://www.subpop.com/rss/image/<post slug>

Non technical internal users, huh? Good thing I’m the only one who reads these things, Huddy.

This could be really interesting if we combined it with our api as well. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’m talking about www.phonesherpa.com)

Dean – take a look at sdk.phonesherpa.com when you get a chance and see if it makes sense to talk further.

cheers.