MUSIC

This short photo essay will display some of the new features of the Iranian.com music section. We now feature new music sub-sections, artist-maintained pages, web-playable audio and for the first time actually purchase music on Iranian.com. Unlike the events section that I talked about before, the music improvements have been done completely in house.They have also taken much longer to complete. Just start here, or jump straight to "new features" or "how to buy music".

The section has come a long long way. Basically over 13 years ago, JJ started making web pages for Iranian musicians, collections and genres. He featured biographies, interviews and publicly available music files. Look at this review he wrote for a rap concert back in May 1996! Over time, he made hundreds and hundreds of pages. The music section quickly became the most visited destination after the front page, and continued to get the most hits up until now, even after we changed formats. Looking at the number of hits, I'm convinced there are regular visitors to the music section who don't visit the front page and probably don't even know what this website is!

The music section is also the most expensive section to operate. Music downloads by thousands of people at a time take up an enormous amount of bandwidth which we have to pay for. I have spent many sleepless nights hunting down robots and search engines that download/cache or hotlink to our music files. At times there was so much downloading that the site would be slowed down significantly. Here's an example.

In addition, there are hundreds of pages to maintain and new links and events to add.

At first, we just copied what JJ had into the new format. But we always meant to expand it to a modern dynamic section. Now with the new Iranian Music Store, we can allow artists or their managers to not only maintain their own page, but also add new audio, videos, reviews, concert dates and most importantly products for sale. The sales happen through Iranian.com and most of the profits go directly to the artists themselves. We had to create a payment and shopping cart system for Iranian.com.

Now any artist that we have an agreement with can put up digital music for sale and anyone can buy it. Any new artist who wants exposure and a hassle-free way to handle sales, can also sign with Iranian.com. If you are an artist interested in working with us, contact our music manager at "music @ iranian.com" to get started. We are excited to announce that Kiosk has signed with us and made their newest album available for sale as part of our re-launching of the music section. Since we decided against any digital rights management system, we have to leave it to our readers and the honor system not to take advantage of the downloads. You can buy Kiosks entire new album for less than $11 including Paypal fees. Once you download the MP3 file, you can copy it and give it to all your friends for free, but please don't! Support and respect the artist instead, by asking your friends to do their music shopping here.

We aim to promote Iranian artists first and foremost and make it worth their time to sell their music to their own community. We also want to see the Iranian Music Store succeed and represent many more artists in the future. Your help would be greatly appreciated.

To see all the new features, just go through the photo essay. Thanks to JJ, Kayvan, Wayne and Kiosk for all their help

00 musicpage

01 old musicpage

02 abjeez

03 kiosk

04 sepehr

05 kiosk

06 niyaz

06 niyaz2

07 music events

08 kiosk

09 buy

10 audio

11 buy music

12 checkout

13 checkout

14 checkout

15 checkout

16 paypal

17 paypal

18 order