If you want to be more avant-garde than your friends, UbuWeb is one stop shopping. Seriously, their selection of sound poetry, experimental film, and related digital artifacts is downright immense. Their manifesto explains their dedication to a gift economy - "UbuWeb has no need for money, funding or backers" - as does their handling of copyright for sound files in their MP3 collection. Since I have a one track mind, let's see how they handle metadata for this portion of the collection.
SELECTION DECISIONS
UbuWeb's scope for their MP3s is clear cut, wisely side-stepping commercial music for all forms of sound art since the birth of recording. The collection is not tied to any specific art movement, which means that emergent forms of sound art are all fair game. Open source media is used whenever copyright is not issue; otherwise files are streamed in RealMedia's proprietary format. The large majority of what they host is "out-of-print, incredibly difficult to find, or in (their) opinion, absurdly overpriced." Copyright is undoubtably a concern, but at least you know whey they're coming from (not that their reasoning obviates them from copyright infringement).
OBJECT CHARACTERISTICS
I've looked around for some of the streaming files but I cannot find any, so I can only comment on the MP3s. They say they rip out-of-print LPs into sound files, but the information stops there so I can only guess what the characteristics of the archival masters are. The MP3s are encoded at 192 kbps, joint stereo, 44.1 kHz with an unknown encoder (unknown to iTunes at least). The comments field of the ID3 tag is relatively thorough, listing the copyright date, affiliated institutions (WFMU, PennSound, Artmob), along with the statement that "all materials at UbuWeb are available for free exchange for noncommercial purposes." Looking at the data file itself, fields are populated for Album, Title, Authors, Duration, Channel count, Total bit rate, and Where from.
METADATA
The metadata is what you would expect from a mostly populated MP3 file (name, artist, album, year, track number), but it looks like fields for artwork, lyrics, and genre are not used. Given that the comments field is actually populated with the terms of use, that's going farther than most MP3s I've downloaded for digital exhibits. No controlled vocabularies were used, best as I can tell, but would you really expect UbuWeb to use one? It almost seems against their nature. I can't speak to the interoperability of ID3 tags, although I know in theory they should be able to translate to some other formats (AIFF, BWF, MP4).
INTENDED AUDIENCE
UbuWeb has carved out a niche as the definitive source for sound poetry. Aficionados of this art form, or avant-garde art in general, have probably already stumbled across the site. According to them they embody an "unstable community," which implies the intended audience is everyone and anyone - especially those people who think language is a virus, or who just can't get enough of the human voice.
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