SoundfishPublishing · 2026-09-23
The album page as the unit of publishing
Why a Soundfish album is a page and a link rather than an entry in a feed — drafts, unlisted links, dated revisions, embeds, per-album downloads, and the metadata each page carries.
The page is the product
A Soundfish album lives at /@handle/slug: one clean page with cover, track list, waveform player, hearts, play counts, timestamped comments, and an embeddable form. There is no feed ranking between your link and the listener — send the URL and the album is what they get.
Three visibility states cover the lifecycle. Drafts are owner-only and preview exactly like the public page. Unlisted albums answer only their link — off the feed, off the artist page, noindexed — while the player, comments, embed, and link previews work identically. Published albums join the catalogue: the feed, the artist page, search engines.
Revisions, not replacements
Every track keeps up to twenty-five dated revisions. Uploading a new take adds a revision instead of overwriting, listeners hear the current one, and the owner can promote any earlier revision back. Comments left on an older version keep a label naming it, so feedback history survives iteration.
Optional per-album downloads hand listeners a presigned attachment named after the track slug — a convenience, not the primary path, because the page itself is the artifact.
Metadata that travels
Each page carries the plumbing a link needs to present well: canonical URL, a Markdown alternate for agents, per-album and per-track social cards generated as images, MusicAlbum and MusicRecording structured data, and embed markup for third-party sites. The same URL helpers generate the addresses everywhere — pages, JSON projections, Markdown twins, and the CLI print identical links.
Artist pages come from published profiles rather than a second account system, so the artist surface and the album surface stay consistent without duplicated identity data.
What this deliberately omits
No follower graph, no repost economy, no algorithmic feed, no store. Those are real features of real products — SoundCloud's discovery network, Bandcamp's storefront — and the comparison pages say so plainly. The bet here is narrower: most of the time a musician wants to hand someone a link and hear what they think, and a page does that better than a platform does.
The short version
A draft becomes a link becomes a release, on one page that keeps its history — that is the whole publishing model.