NautilusCD August Hot List

The topic this month: Rock star Web pages. This topic turned out to be more difficult than I had initially thought, not because it was hard to find Web pages, or even good Web pages, for rock stars, but because there are so many. Winnowing out those you see below took some time, and although I almost certainly missed your favorite artist, if you check out the massive listing of artists on Yahoo, I'm sure you'll find the one you want. That said, here's a few pages that I found interesting.

Most Web pages for rock stars aren't created by the stars (or even their flunkies), but are instead built by fans, presumably fans with a fair amount of time on their hands. Evan Torrie's David Bowie File is a classic example of such fan-built Web pages, with an extensive list of albums, songs on those albums, and lyrics to those songs. The David Bowie File also includes information about movies and videos involving Bowie, information about Bowie, a number of scanned pictures of the performer throughout his career (including several shots from professional photographer Steve Rapport), and links to many other Bowie-related sites on the Internet.

Liz Phair's fans easily win the title for using the most Netscape-enhanced features in their Web pages. Four of the five Liz Phair home pages I found use background colors or images (which make reading the text on top of them deucedly difficult) and the fifth uses Netscape tables. These sites also fall into the classic fan site category, with information about Liz Phair, lyrics to her songs, audio samples, pictures (including a fabulously staid high school yearbook photo of Phair), articles and interviews, and so on. Most interesting about the Liz Phair sites is the way they all borrow information from one another and present it in slightly different ways. Discussions about Liz Phair and her music also run rampant on a related mailing list and on the LizNet bulletin board, so if you're a fan, check it out.

Although dedicated solely to Annie Lennox's latest album, Medusa, this site is a good look at what you get when a company puts up an official Web page. Along with legal 45 second samples of each song, and Lennox's thoughts about the songs and her performances of them, this site includes a number of large movies and images you can download if you have a fast connection or patience. Perhaps most interesting, though, is that the site includes one song, "Love Song for a Vampire," that's not on the album itself. Does that make this a collectors' Web site?

Hang out wit da Stones on the official Rolling Stones Web page. Check out several two-minute song excerpts, interviews, and videos. You can also view bad Polaroid photographs taken by Ronnie Wood. Or try your hand at writing Stones fiction.

The home page for the Canadian artist Sarah McLachlan comes not from fans, but from her record company, the independent label Nettwerk Productions. The site has all of the prerequisite features, including lyrics, audio samples that aren't copyright violations in any way, a discography (a comprehensive list of all Sarah McLachlan's recordings), pictures of the artist and the albums, tour dates, and even a newsletter. Missing are the links to other sites on the Web, and the often unbridled enthusiasm of the fan is replaced by the more considered enthusiasm of the company that markets the music. On the upside, Nettwerk has a catalog of Sarah McLachlan merchandise, ranging from the albums to posters to t-shirts to mugs and hats.

The many pages on the Web devoted to Pink Floyd span the gamut from mediocre fan-built pages to the official Pink Floyd page from Sony Music that contains press releases and recent album information. In between you find pages like Joshua Jensen's Pink Links page, the Network Digital Jukebox Music Sampler, which has massive 3 minute clips from many Pink Floyd songs, and a classic fan page with all the pictures, interviews, movies, and lyrics that you could want. Serious collectors may wish to check out the RoIO (record of illegitimate/indeterminate origin) site.