Full RSS Feeds on Music Blogs and Sites

The music website/blog community has probably been the slowest in the overall, widespread adoption of RSS as a viable form of web publishing. Believe me as I’m somewhat privy to this given my day job…

I’m not sure if we’re just afraid of it or if we honestly think that the only reason RSS exists is to drive visitors to your website, but it’s painstakingly obvious that many sites don’t really use RSS to it’s full potential. Take Pitchfork for example, a site that most everyone interested in any indie and/or DIY-related music and artists frequent. Their RSS feed absolutely sucks. Sure, I get headlines and a few excerpts but the benefits stop there. It’s as if the Pitchfork editors don’t actually subscribe to their own RSS feeds to see how they’re published. If they did, they’d notice that it’s not really readable and therefore hardly usable.

Maybe that’s an unfair gripe on them but it comes with experience — their RSS feed needs some work and as a music fan subscribed to their site, I’m continually finding myself slightly annoyed that I need a tutorial to navigate through their latest news stories. “Wait, what section is this again?” “Wait, that news story got updated, published twice in the feed, but it’s shown only once on the site?”

I can bet that most everyone that does actually frequent that site does so through a bookmark and not their RSS reader.

When I checked on the JamBase RSS feed this morning, I was greeted with a nice surprise — FULL content RSS feeds. Andy and the boys at JamBase are doing this right by allowing the fans of the site to subscribe to the full content as it’s published. From me to you, JamBase — thank you. I’ve always enjoyed your content, and I want to continue to enjoy it in a manner I so choose. Because I’m so special.

You’ll start to see this more and more as RSS adoption continues to take off, especially for the music website publishers that were in the game before bloggers entered the ring…