Did you know: the MP3s we’re offering for sale on the site of the Fleet Foxes stunning new Sun Giant EP at 256k? It’s the first of our MP3 records that we’ve been able to make available at the higher bitrate.

Lap it up! All 256k bits are belong to you.

Hi friends. Lots going on here in the Sub Pop Records Office of Technical Staff (and everywhere else at SPHQ) in the ‘08.

First and foremost: in case you haven’t heard, Sub Pop will be turning 20 this year. In honor of ourselves, we’re getting into all sorts of hoo-ha: there’s talk of some sort of big festival this summer in Seattle and rumors of a limited run of the Sub Pop Singles Club (which will include some sort of digital component). And did I mention that we’re putting out a boatload of great records (including the newly released records from The Helio Sequence and Kelley Stoltz )?

On the technical side we’ve been working on some of the guts of subpop.com. While this work isn’t the most glamorous it should make the site a bit snappier and offer some substantial improvements to browsing our catalog.

We’re also working on upgrading the bitrates on our salable MP3s (due to popular demand). While it may take a while to get all the new encoding straightened out, don’t forget that if you buy MP3s now you’ll be able to log in later and download upgraded bitrates and/or other formats. What I’m saying is, get your MP3s here!

Also, we’re working on some screencasts with how-tos, highlights of some of our favorite site features, hijinks and whatever else we can think of that warrants the effort.

We pushed out a bunch of changes at the end of the year too; you can leave comments on records, there’s a comments feed (if you’re more interested in what people are saying about us than what we’re saying) and in a retro ‘03 maneuver we added a tag cloud to our revamped channels page.

There’s lots more stuff on the way, but I’ve typed enough for now—as always leave comments or email webmaster if you have any bright ideas for us…

You may have noticed that Sub Pop Radio has been down for the past couple of days. You may even be concerned about it’s safety. Don’t worry, it’s not going anywhere. We’re currently between broadcasting servers—until now the radio station has been running from my the iTunes on my desktop machine, which, (while I love Sub Pop Radio) proved to be unsustainable at best. But we’ve got an art-department-retired mac that we’re setting up as a separate broadcast station and we’ll be back up in the next couple days. When we do get it set up it’ll be much more reliable (since it’ll no longer be subject to my whimsical reboots) and will allow the staff to run all sorts of radio shows (since they won’t have to kick me off my workstation to do it). Stay, well, um, tuned.

We’re a very small shop (in terms of software development), and we’ve been pretty busy in the past year just taking care of the basic needs of our non-technical internal users, but one thing I’d very much like to do is open up the data that we use on our site (and internally) to 3rd party applications.

We’ve got all sorts of interesting data—artist info, release info, track info (with ISRCs), photos, mp3s, tour dates, and on and on. So here’s the question that I’d like to pose: would you be be interested in building something around this data? If so, what sorts of things would you like to do and what data would you like to see exposed?

If you have ideas we’d love to hear them. Just leave them in the comments or email webmaster.

Thanks!

As you may or may not now know, we are now offering MP3 versions of albums for sale on our site. This is a good thing, and something that we here in the Office of the Technical Staff and at Sub Pop Headquarters in general are super excited about.

So what are the details? Well, let me enumerate…

• As I write this, we are currently offering somewhere in between 10 and 20 full albums as zip files containing 192khz MP3s of each track on said albums. In the next few days we will be putting up the bulk of our catalog.
• If you see a little iPod™-like icon in the list of available formats with “MP3s” beside it, that means the record is available in downloadable MP3 format.
• You can purchase the MP3s in the same way as you purchase anything else on the site. Just click the icon and add it to your cart. The MP3s will be available for download once you’ve completed your transaction. You can freely mix digital with non-digital thingies and we’ll (happily) figure out what’s what and process your order.
• Because we’re running you through our normal cart, we’ll ask you for things like your shipping address. Please take the time to fill this out correctly! We won’t come knocking at your door or send you any junk mail and if you do decide to buy physical product at a later date, it’ll be that much easier for you to check out.
• Once you’ve purchased your MP3s they’ll be available for download on your user account page.
• Not only that, but you can download the files you’ve purchased from your account page at any time and multiple times—if we update the download in any way (think bitrate or bonus tracks or whatever), you can just log in, go to your download page and get the new version of the file.

Why 192khz? Well, when we were working this stuff out it seemed like a pretty great compromise between downloadability and fidelity, but if we’re faced with an overwhelming demand for higher bitrate files, we’ll certainly do what we can to accommodate. And we’ll be sure to make any updates available to those who’ve already purchased from us!

We’re excited for you to try this out, so get at it! We’re also ready to reward (read: bribe) you, our loyal subpop.com customers for choosing our digital experience, so keep on the lookout for bonus downloads, album previews and anything else that we can think of to keep you on the line.

Have fun, and buy some stuff!