Affino 7.1 is now out, and it’s a major release in every way. Whilst there are many aspects to this Affino release, the two key threads are improved scaling and greater engagement. Affino 7.1 has been significantly re-architected to scale with new search and analytics engines. With the release of Affino 7.1 we will also be migrating sites to our new super-scaling cloud.

We’ve rolled out big updates to many core Affino services including Messaging, Search, Analysis, Customer Ladder and Relationships. We’ve also introduced great features such as Store Credits for incentivising customers, and Design Panels for creating great popups.

The combined improvements in the Customer Ladder (engagement), Messaging and Analysis add up to a breakthrough for sales and marketing automation. The new Messaging Campaigns for bulk premium, personal and SMS messages, come with advanced targeting, filtering and triggering options and great analytics.

Site Search has been completely re-engineered around Solr which gives Affino greatly improved performance on searches, and allows for much smarter searching. Core management elements such as relating content have also seen big updates focused on making editorial teams much more productive.

Altogether there are nearly 400 great new updates in this release, many of which will be transformative when fully rolled out on existing Affino sites.

We have also fixed most of the identified low-level issues which arose from the Affino 7 launch, and which are inevitable with the introduction of such a significant new platform.

Upgrade Guidance

The Affino 7.1 release is a signifiant update, and unlike most Affino releases, this one takes some time to run as we’re completely restructuring all the analytics data and refreshing the search indices. Given how intense this update is on the infrastructure, and that your site will be moved to the new hosting cloud, it is essential that you co-ordinate your update with your account manager.

Also in this release is a significant change to how most images are presented as you can now set the margins around the main images using Design Styles / CSS. It is essential to review your pages to ensure that the images are presented as expected, and note that you can now optimise the layout.

It is essential that

Affino is named after affinity, and it’s ability to bring together content, products, people, media, events and communications. These are the core elements essential to any online business. We have many great elements in Affino for showcasing and recommending relevant related items, and are now making it much easier to make those connections.

Even though it is possible to make all the relationships work, it has definitely not been as productive as it could be. That all changes in the next release.

Related Items is getting a big update in Affino 7.1. There are three key elements to the update, the first being the relating screens (see above), the second is smarter deleting and sorting of the related items, the the third is the ability to change the order in which related elements are displayed, e.g. have related Members above related Articles.

Smarter Selections

If you look at the screen above you’ll see five key improvements which add up to a lot of saved time for editors who spend much of their day publishing new content and pulling in the best matching content.

• Smarter Search - Related Items now have the new search bar, with the most requested filtering options.
• Smarter Sort - default the items are always listed reverse chronologically and you can click the column headers to change the sorting as required
• Two-way Relationships - it is now possible to related both ways, instantly, simply by clicking on the relevant linking options. No need to track down the other item and link back separately
• Pop-up Lookup - you can view any item you wish to confirm prior to relating, it will simply open up in a new tab
• No More Paging - you no longer lose sight of the items you’ve related, simply click the more link to display further options

Order Order

Relating content and people can be a tricky process, especially where seniority is involved. Relating products and accessories, when done right, can have a significant impact on conversion rates (i.e. having the latest or most popular product highlighted first). Relating Events in the correct sequence is key to continued engagement. Relating programmes and other media in order make all the difference.

So in Affino 7.1 you will be able to select the order within each category, e.g. products, articles, media, and be able to select the

Ecommerce is speeding up, and no one is safe if they’re not fully committed to meeting the evolving market head on. 2013 will see big winners and losers as more shopping goes digital.

Here are some of the key trends for the coming year.

Personalisation

Nothing comes close in importance to being able to tailor the buying experience for each and every one of the shoppers who comes to you, whether it’s online, on mobile devices, kiosks, in-store or via television.

The starting point for personalisation is the unified user account. This means offering a single login for the user across all devices, with instant syncing of user data across all different sales interfaces, or preferably using a single client-facing commercial engine across all platforms.

Product listings, product searches, recommendations, emailers and community engagement should all be tailored to the individual user. This should be done on recently viewed products, identified interests, and increasingly by using game mechanics to automatically identify and guide users’ buying preferences.

Cloud

The economics, scale and distribution of Cloud setups mean that companies must embrace cloud services in 2013. Even though there are still occasional headline stories on cloud provider down-time, cloud services are maturing rapidly, and in real-world scenarios downtime is becoming increasingly rare.

On the other hand the cloud costs keep on coming down, and the service levels are rising dramatically each year. It means the cost / performance / scale / reliability equation has now firmly swung in favour of cloud setups rather than in-house infrastructure for ecommerce.

Being able to deliver a rapid response, at scale, globally, is best delivered via cloud platforms. Solutions such as Scalr mean that it is now possible to automatically scale up and down your infrastructure. This means that you only pay for what you use, and can run much fewer servers as a baseline, even within the same day as demand scales up and down. It also means that you can address peak demand with the best response times.

Using Content Delivery Networks means that your media and static files are delivered locally, globally, with much faster response times. Using cloud-based storage networks with offsite backup networks means

Our priority for Affino 7 has been to make the most productive platform available for running your business online. The integrated nature of Affino means you only have to manage your community, content, products, design, , promotions and analytics in one place. This is by far the most effective approach for managing an online business. What we have done with Affino 7 is to improve in every way how how you manage your online business.

Affino 7 has a New Control Centre, with the pages delivered by a New Page Generation Engine, and it runs on a New Cloud Architecture, all with the intent to deliver the best Social Commerce platform on the market today.

New Look Affino

We’ve brought together great productivity ideas from the Affino user community and the Comrz team. It has meant re-styling, re-factoring and re-architecting Affino from the ground up to be more productive and easier to learn. Affino 7 also has a great new minimalist look, and now works great on tablets and mobile devices. With Affino 7 we’ve set a new baseline which means that every new element we roll out in Affino will be that much better.

Affino has a brand new Control Centre and Live Edit tools. It is now optimised whether you’re using it on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile device, so you can use it anywhere any time. We’ve really raised the bar for every management interface in Affino. You fill find almost every task easier to do, with great new short-cuts, lookups, help items, searches, lists, entry forms, and navigation elements.

Affino has been brought right up to the leading edge with it’s platform support. It now runs on the latest technology which means it is faster, more reliable and more scalable than ever before. It also means that the Comrz team will be able to accelerate the development of the Affino platform in the weeks and months ahead.

There’s a great new Design Centre. The Design Objects are now completely managed within native browsers with no Flash requirement. All the Design Control screens have seen significant updates and Affino now has better than ever custom CSS support. We’ve also introduced some much needed enhancements such as padding on Design Cells and full Font styling, along with a breakthrough ability for you to be able to secure each and every Design Element

The Affino 7 Control Centre will build on familiar metaphors. Behind the scenes it’s all change though with every single screen having been updated.

You will be more productive at doing almost any management task, whatever the context.

New Look

Expect a great new look. It’s a natural evolution for Affino, and is better suited to the mix of desktop and mobile environments Affino is used in. It will also be faster.

No Screen Left Behind

We have been on a year-long process of updating every Control screen to be more effective at delivering what is needed. We will complete that process in Affino 7, with dozens of interfaces becoming much more useful.

Frameless

One of the biggest compromises we made with the Affino Control Centre was using frames to display the navigation elements. This was essential at the time to allow for dynamic drill-down navigation, but it meant that the URLs were no longer representative of what you were doing.

Frames are deprecated, they’re on the way out. Although they’re still supported by browsers they are no longer the best way to do things. HTML 5 offers us better alternatives. This will mean though that you will need a modern browser to manage Affino sites. IE7 doesn’t cut it any more.

Control/Promotion

You will be able to directly link through to any management screen using simple URLs. No more clicking around required.

Also when you share a URL, it will be exactly the screen you’re referring to. Something which will be particularly useful for support.

There is a massive benefit for Affino development with this approach in that we can now run a great deal more automated tests on the Control Centre, which should ensure higher quality levels all round.

Security

We’re working through every control screen again to ensure that the highest level of security is in place for each one. Since nothing is more important.

Less Flashy

Since Flash simply doesn’t work on mobile devices any more (and never really did) we’ve been busy removing it for the past year and a half. Affino 7 sees the removal of all but two Flash control elements (Dashboards and the Media Editor) which will be converted to HTML 5 in the following release.

Design Centre

Scale, Speed, being Current and Automation are the driving forces behind the evolution of the Affino 7 cloud architecture.

ColdFusion 10

The major catalyst for the upgraded Affino Cloud Architecture is ColdFusion 10. Affino has a long history as a ColdFusion application, dating back to the original ColdFusion Beta from Allaire.

ColdFusion has come a long way since then, and it is now primarily a RAD application platform built on top of Java. In practice we increasingly code directly to Java where required / beneficial.

It is not a ‘sexy’ platform in that it is commercial rather than open source, it is however an excellent platform for developing web applications, and Adobe has done a great job with the latest release.

In practice many / most of the advantages for Affino in the move to CF10 revolve around it’s tighter integration with Java. Key CF improvements are tighter Adobe and Microsoft platform / document integrations.

Tomcat / Apache

The Java Server evolution for ColdFusion to Tomcat is a big step forward for Affino, and after our initial trials it is clear to us that we need to take the next step and shift to Apache from IIS as well.

We see a lot of benefits coming in terms of automation and scaling from the move to Tomcat / Apache for Affino.

REST and HTML 5 Websockets

We’re going to be able to make big code stack changes with the new native RESTful and HTML 5 capabilities of the ColdFusion platform.

It means clearing out a considerable amount of proprietary code and replacing it with native calls. Something that we’re already well underway with.

Solr

We envisage using Solr as a core search technology in Affino 7, to drive up scale, accuracy and performance significantly.

Image Magick

We will continue using ImageMagick for media processing as we simply can’t find anything which delivers better performance.

Microsoft Servers

We are sticking with Microsoft servers for the time-being both for the application and database servers. They have served us very well, however it is going to be critical that we can automate more aspects, and either Microsoft will need to deliver on these or we will review these in the future as well.

Amazon EC2, S3,

Affino 6.0.16 is the final significant Affino 6 release. It’s the culmination of a greatly improved Affino user experience where almost every interface has been enhanced during the course of the last couple of years. We’ve focused on smoothing out the remaining rough edges in Affino 6 and it’s now a whole level easier than it’s ever been.

This release sees the introduction of Cookie Policies to meet the EU Privacy Directive. These are smart and geo-targeted so that only users from the relevant countries are presented with the policy dialogue. Additionally continued browsing is registered as implied consent so as to minimise any disruption to the user.

Affino ecommerce makes yet another big step forward. In this release we’ve significantly improved shopping baskets which are now editable, can be taken over and handed back to customers, or created from scratch and assigned to customers. The baskets also have greatly improved audit tracking and styling. There are also dozens of significant updates throughout the shopping experience which mean that buying is now more engaging than ever in Affino.

There are some major usability improvements in this release, in particular the new Guest Browsing Mode which allows you to instantly switch to the customer’s point of view when managing the site. It is now much easier to navigate through the Control Centre with better browser tab naming and highlighted drill-down links throughout the Control Centre.

As with all Affino releases, we have upgraded the integrations with a number of 3rd parties to reflect their changed APIs. We also integrate with Broadbean for the first time for incoming job briefs. The integration updates with Facebook, LinkedIn, PayPal, Metacafe and Google Merchant Centre are critical if you integrate with any of them.

The improvements we have also made to: the checkout, publishing workflows, recruitment, funding platform, geo blocking / targeting, and user export make this an essential update if you’re using any of those elements.

This is also going to be the best tested, most polished Affino release to-date, as we further evolve our quality assurance processes and build up our core project management team. We’ve added a whole new layer of QA in this release so that you can have the best possible

Affino 6.0.15 Release - Ecommerce, Usability and Recruitment

This release is the culmination of seven months work on the new Optimised Affino Checkout. During the course of the last six months we have rolled out dozens of incremental improvements (and fixes) to the checkout process to drive higher conversion rates. The checkout experience has been taken to the next level with a complete revamp for simple, fast checkouts. We’ve also rolled out a new ecommerce engine, greatly simplified the ecommerce setup and made many nuanced enhancements to the whole ecommerce experience.

We continue our focus on Usability with in-context Help and Feature guides in each Control Centre. We have also greatly improved the process for setting up and running multiple Affino sites on a single Affino instance. Hundreds more elements have been made more intuitive than they were previously, and a lot of rough edges have been smoothed in this release.

Recruitment also sees a great leap forward with dozens of essential enhancements, including a great new Job Search Design Element, recommended jobs, refined CV handling and much more.

Affino’s style has also subtly improved in this release. Many elements now look better than before, in particular Affino Design Elements, but also the font sizes and proportions, many notifications, most ecommerce and recruitment elements, member search, the funding platform and events.

Upgrade Guidance

This is a Major update which sees amends to everything from registering, logging in, adding to the basket, checking out, member’s profiles, all Design Elements and much more. It is essential that you set aside time to review your site after the update. Ensure that you liaise with your Account Manager prior to the update and update during Comrz support hours to ensure a rapid response to any issues.

Note: you are strongly advised to become familiar with the new checkout on Public Staging prior to updating to this release. It is a complete reworking of how it works and it’s essential that you are prepared for the changes.

It is essential that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the System Update, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update, Skin Update and finally Clear Guest Cache; all of which are available on

This project is the culmination of a year’s work (for the Graphics!), in some ways it could be said to be the culmination of Affino’s 15 years of development. We have long wanted an elegant means of showcasing the extensive Affino Features Set - and we have takled it a number of ways previously - trying to do a complete features listing (100’s of individual elements - now archived for being too large), and the much celebrates ’Periodic Table of Affino Elements’ - which has 128 listed features - yet still needs further essential additions.

This time it was going to be simpler, yet more detailed, more illustrative at the same time, and punctuated with some lovely iconographic and obviously meaningful pictures and screencaptures. We hand-picked a list of 50 key features as we saw them; alas ’Affino Messenger’ still remains to be re-developed in HTML5 (some way off), but the other 49 can now be found listed on the pictured Affino Features screen; they are as follows:

The intention is that they serve as a great reference for all of us, customers new and old - in getting a full and proper picture of Affino, and reminding us of useful features, functions and utilities that we were thinking of making use of but never quite got round to implementing on our site/s.

Music

My personal input of course, but for me - Music- and TV-wise it’s been a vintage year, pretty good for literature too, not so good for film though. There were a few trends in music with several artists self-publishing their albums and making them free to download - including my top rated ’The Weeknd’ (x2) which I was relatively late to latch onto, thanks to FACT Magazine for the introduction. Björk famously released interactive apps for each of her album tracks - I kind of agree a little with Pitchfork on this one - melody was sacrificed to art and science - her best in a while, but not nearly her best.

My tastes are famously eclectic and veer between Drowned in Sound, Popjustice, FACT-style dance electronica, Pitchfork, Q, MixMag, DJ, IDJ and Resident Advisor - possibly with a rather keen emphasis on the electronic / dance varieties. There’s not too much guitar-based music here, but plenty of pop and electronic and a smattering of Hip Hop and R&B:

2011 Albums of the Year - Top 30

1. House of Balloons; The Weeknd [Trip Hop / R&B] - Chill Wave R&B-infused Hip Hop with great production and melodies
2. Thursday; The Weeknd [Trip Hop / R&B] - More of the same...
3. Nostalgia, Ultra; Frank Ocean [R&B / Hip Hop] - A kind of soulful chilled out largely sung hip hop
4. Glass Swords; Rustie [Dubstep / Electronica] - Modern, eclectic, mostly instrumental dancefloor electronica with roots in Dubstep
5. Electronic Dream; Araabmuzik [Electronica / House] - A great mish-mash of contemporary club sounds with a chilled-out edge
6. Oh Land; Oh Land [Pop / Electropop] - Lush, delicate melodic electronic pop
7. Vanbot; Vanbot [Pop / Electropop] - Bright and melodic electronic pop - like Robyn’s little sister
8. On A Mission; Katy B [Dubstep / UK Funky] - Slick, melodic vocal UK dancefloor-inspired grooves
9. 21; Adele [Bluesy Pop / Soul] - The finest mainstream pop release for nigh on 2 decades - heartwrenchingly soulful
10. Ritual Union; Little Dragon [Electropop] - Really cool, slightly quirky electronic pop
11. Perfectionist; Natalia Kills [Pop / Electropop] - Almost the perfect pop debut, chock-full of catchy hooks, with superb production
12. Mirrorwriting; Jamie Woon [Digi-Soul / Dubstep] - More consistent and affecting for me than James Blake’s debut - lushly soulful
13. Ceremonials; Florence and The Machine [Indie Pop] -

Affino Blogs and Forum will have great Oembed support in the next release. This means that all you have to do is paste the URLs to your favourite videos, images, tracks and presentations for them to appear in your blog posts and forum threads.

Here’s some examples:

SoundCloud

Vimeo

Click through for many more examples of the rich media experience.

A few weeks ago I posted a blog titled ’The Increasing Internationalisation of Media ’ - about how consumers are influenced by and access media globally. I often get musical recommendations from the 4 corners of the world - via various mailing subscriptions and music blogs, and end up buying the CD on import from CD WOW ! or similar - as for whatever reason Amazon or iTunes don’t make that track or album available for me - either in hard copy or download format!

One of the blogs I follow fairly regularly is Perez Hilton , and although our musical tastest don’t really align that much, he often features interesting new artists - as a recent example - quirky up-and-coming Danish pop chanteuse Nanna Fabricius, aka ’Oh Land ’.

It turns out that ’Oh Land’s ’ YouTube Channel is part of the Vevo service - a joint venture between Universal Music Group , Sony Music Entertainment and EMI . These companies randomly ’license’ these pop promo videos for random broadcast in some or no countries outside the US.

Some tracks can be viewed in the UK, most cannot; from Iceland - pretty much everything under the ’Vevo ’ banner is blocked. These are ’Pop Video Promos’ for goodness sake!!! They’re supposed to promote artists to encourage consumers to buy their music, merchandise and live event tickets. There should be no licensing issue here! This is not a live televised broadcast of ultra exclusive content. Because of Iceland’s geographic position (close proximity to USA), American output is available almost simultaneously in Iceland - so preventing this market from viewing US promotional material is a little nuts.

Surely it’s in the best interest of the record label and artist to gain maximum exposure of promotional material! Kanye West knows how it works - he blogs, tweets and is happy for his promo videos to be featured and promoted wherever by supportive fans.

When I come across an artist or track I like, I want to be able to support and endorse them by embedding said YouTube video on my site, and giving it vocal support via a favourable rating or commentary - this is surely a no-brainer for the artist concerned.

For a minor-league artist like ’Oh Land’ I really cannot understand why I would see the statement:

"This video contains content from Vevo, who has b... More

Simon Cowell has obviously been keeping one beady eye on Glee ’s success in releasing show music via iTunes . Glee just recently surpassed the Beatles in achieving 75 Billboard Top 100 hits - the Beatles amassed 71 in circa 30 years, Glee has achieved its success in under 2 years.

An email has just comes through from Apple announcing that all of tonight’s live X Factor performances are available for download - for the princely sum of £0.99 each. For trial purposes I downloaded my favourite performance of the night - Aiden Grimshaw’s beautiful version of Tears for Fears’ ’Mad World’ - which is all of 2:17 minutes long. The price point is exactly the same as the Glee singles, but for me this is somewhat of a rip-off. In my recent ’The Increasing Internationalisation of Media’ posting, I suggested a price point of £0.59 as being the correct, acceptable pricing point for a single - this is 20 pence lower than the current regular price of £0.79. There are all kinds of clever Internet applications which can capture the track from the live broadcast and render it as an MP3 track for free. This is just a typical case of corporate greed taking advantage of the less savvy consumer.

At least with Glee what you get is a fully studio-recorded version with proper post-production mixing and proper mastering. All professional musicians will tell you about the key importance of mixing and mastering the recording to a high standard. For X Factor we are simply getting audio captures from the live broadcast - with audience noise etc. included. However much a fan of X Factor I might be, I am slightly put out by this sly opportunistic move by the show producers. The standout Glee tracks are performed under studio conditions - mostly with brilliant arrangements, and performed by talented professionals. Most of the X Factor output is far far below the quality of what comes out of Glee . That said, the Aiden Grimshaw track was of perfectly acceptable quality for playback - I just find the cost of the track way too high.

If software developers Rovio can take several months to produce the highly addictive game ’Angry Birds ’ and sell this for £0.59 how can the music or entertainments industry justify £0.99 for re-cycled snippets of TV content? The maths of t... More

The Internet is largely a multi-cultural and International environment. Peoples of many countries follow the same news, blog and entertainment resources, yet don’t have the same access to related media content. I can perfectly understand for live broadcast events - why you might want to and need to have Geo-blocking and Regional restrictions in place, I no longer understand why for general Videos, DVDs, Music etc. there are restrictions from one country to another.

This failing was perfectly illustrated when I was on holiday in Iceland a week ago. Iceland lies midway between the USA and Europe, and is equally influenced by both continents. Most of Iceland’s American TV content runs concurrently with the US release schedule - the same goes for say Music CD’s - as Iceland is midway in the Atlantic, music releases are pretty spontaneous here - arriving simultaneously from USA, UK and Europe. Iceland has no MTV website - yet it can access most of MTV USA. When I’m in the UK, lots of MTV USA content is restricted to USA IP addresses. Lots of related US TV program resources though are restricted from viewing from Iceland - this makes no sense to me?

I follow a lot of American news sites and blogs, and often get blocked by the relevant video player for being in the wrong country - ’This media is owned by Sony and is not licenced for your Region!’ or something similar. This happens quite a lot for YouTube music videos, which I totally cannot understand. I also cannot understand why music available on USA iTunes might not be available on UK iTunes - I can go to the same music blog sites, artist sites, MySpace sites etc. - I know the album is out, I have heard most of the tracks, but I am unable to buy the album officially in my locality. I don’t condone media Piracy in any way, but fully understand why and how it happens. All people are created the same - they hear or see something, and they instantly want to own it - for quite a lot of content, immediate ownership can only be gained by illegal means.

I can understand why the big music giants did this in the past - they want to co-ordinate releases for maximum exposure and maximum chart impact - so they sell more of said release. Alas I think, those days are far behind us now. Interesting statistics from USA TV audience research are showing... More

In view of the declining consumption of ’solid media’ that is to say - Printed Media and CDs in particular, it is becoming ever more important to justify / qualify the cost of digital media. A whole generation has grown up with the ’Free Internet’. There are enormous numbers of digital media consumers who pay nothing for the privilege of viewing, reading, listening to or even downloading their daily fix of media.

Back in my childhood days the type and number of media outlets was very limited, we did not have 1,000 flavours of internet radio, or Digital TV, let alone eBooks or any of the Internet by-products. If you wanted something for free, it usually meant shifting your butt down to the local public lending library - where books and complementary media could be taken on loan for a week or so.

The evolution of technologies like iTunes and Kindle (and obviously the Internet in general) have had a dramatic effect on how media is consumed. Most music these days is acquired via MP3 download; globally - probably half of this is via illegal downloads - where the artists receive no remuneration for their efforts. Recent news coverage reported that for the first quarter of the year, Amazon had sold 150 eBooks for every 100 printed books that had been shifted, and more recent figures show a ratio of 180 to 100, almost at 2:1. There’s of course the current debate with Newspapers and Magazines vs Subscriptions and Paywalls. However, there are several things that the digital industry does quite poorly, and this needs to change to shift more ’consumers’ from the freebooter bandwagon over to the status of paid-up customer.

I know these issues as well as anyone, as I am an avid consumer of Music, Books and Movies. I still buy a lot of music on Vinyl and CD - in fact the majority of my music I prefer to buy in those formats, as I like to enjoy a fully tactile, tangible, sensory experience with my media. I like the solidity of a CD Case or Album Sleeve, I enjoy reading the liner notes and lyrics and smelling the scent of fresh print. I also like to be engaged by clever visuals, great album art and the exotic feel of quality parchment papers. The same goes for thumbing through a weighty book - there is a degree of heritage and worth, that just is not currently reflected in or conveyed by digital... More

The Future of Music Retail - Introduction

2 Significant music-related things happened for me in 2009. Firstly, I signed up for the Premium version of streaming service - Spotify ; secondly, I finally succumbed to Apple and bought into the iPhone smartphone. I have several discarded MP3 players and iPods which have somewhat fallen into disuse as I found it a burden to carry around so many devices. The fact that the iPhone comes with iTunes / iPod functionality means that I now always have a subset of my music collection with me (circa 300 albums). However! Neither Spotify or iTunes combined come anywhere close to meeting my broad musical tastes - they just don’t quite cover the range. Moreover, I am still quite captivated by solid formats; I like the ownership of something tangible, the smell of freshly printed vinyl sleeves, the artwork and cover notes. So I end up syncing playlists on Spotify for offline use, buying some music from iTunes , but still largely buying CDs for albums and Vinyl 12"s for singles. In the meantime, the Internet has evolved a vast array of Music-related services, as we will see:

Solid Format Online Music Retail

If you are buying traditional music formats online, you are most likely buying from either Amazon or Play.com  or HMV  or even Tower Records . All have excellent retail catalogue functionality, with Amazon setting the standard for enhanced features, related recommendations and notifications. The holy grail for Online Retail really is automated cross-selling - that is to say - encouraging discovery of like artists and music by way of recommendations and notifications. Most sites now feature ’Customers who bought / liked this also bought / liked this ...’. You are encouraged to set and refine your preferences, with which the site builds a profile to send you notifications for related offers. I use a number of dance specialists sites, including Juno , Phonica , Boomkat , HTFR , Decks.de and HHV.de ; niche music sites Rough Trade , Discovery Records , Piccadilly Records , Music Non Stop and Norman Records ; moreover, I also use specialist music marketplaces (think of them as dedicated eBay-like retail platforms) - Discogs and GEMM . These are my key resources for buying music, and because of my broad tastes, I often end up using upwards of 20 different retail... More