presenting music on a web page - notes

A commenter/screenshotter yesterday inadvertently pointed out the inherent pathos of a music blog with mp3 links removed. Sorry, it does look kind of silly. Have been gradually pruning sound files, oldest first, for reasons of storage/bandwidth/spam, and 2002-2005 posts are pretty much empty of active sound links. I reposted the blog in question mostly as a slice of obscure history. It's also a collection of ideas for how music can be represented through peripherals: text description, photos, diagrams, notation, artwork -- without direct access to the thing itself.
A later, very successful model for how to generate a scene/life/activity around contingent, waiting-to-be-clicked sound files has been Soundcloud.
I just kind of hate the simple-minded reduction of watching a cursor scroll through a wave file, as the inscription alternates between loud (exciting!) and soft (dull!) moments. Apparently we need this visual trick to make the dead data of 1s and 0s come alive and stay alive for 3 plus minutes. And then the highly artificial, intrusive, hypnosis-breaking device of having people post their faces and "Yo! Really tight groove, mate" smack in the middle of the timeline.
There's got to be a better way but apparently there isn't. Another alternative is YouTube style streams with everything from full-blown music videos to static LP covers positioned above the moving cursor.
All this assumes you need to do something with your eyes while your ears are working. And underscores that the web and blogging are visual media, despite the amount of music content online.

Ongoing edits.