Creating a Multiple-Format Streaming Audio Site
- Joe Satriani: A Web Site with On-Demand Files in Multiple Formats and Special Event Live Streams
- Building and Maintaining Community
- Streaming Architecture
- Summary
Joe Satriani: A Web Site with On-Demand Files in Multiple Formats and Special Event Live Streams
This example details a famous musician's promotional and fan-oriented Web site that has many on-demand files of songs authored in multiple formats and occasionally has live streams for special events.
Department of Disclaimers
FezGuy #1 is the webmaster/mad genius behind http://www.satriani.com. But lest anyone think that we're horn-tooting types, let it be known that we chose this site only because it's relevant, and we have an intimate working knowledge of how it all goes together and the reasons those choices were made.
History and Design
http://www.satriani.com is the online presence for the internationally popular instrumental guitarist Joe Satriani. Over the course of a decade, Satriani has released over 12 albums and toured extensively. His Web site is designed to be informative and useful primarily to his fans, offering standard features such as chat areas, a discography, photographs, and tour information. For the aficionado, the site also offers more detailed technical information about the guitarist's technique and tools.
The design and implementation of the site was handled with the assumption that most visitors to http://www.satriani.com would already know the guitarist and probably own at least one album. To familiarize visitors with the guitarist's entire catalog (thereby driving increased album sales), a 45-second on-demand streaming clip of every song on every album is provided using an easily navigable design. Only a handful of full-length on-demand songs are available. Recent album releases have offered MP3 downloads and multiple bit rate RealMedia on-demand streams of the first designated single. These downloads are made available to fans before the album is released to radio.