I'm excited for this.  I've got experience in code and Linux.  I've worked on open source projects from a 32-bit BASIC compiler to submitting patches for big, mainstream OSS.  I wish I had time to commit to this fully and openly (sometimes I wish I had the time that I did in high school), but short of working on this full-time, I will commit as much of my free time as I can to working on the code, server and everything that needs work.

The future of the AMP is finally becoming the perfect musician community that I've been looking for.

MAP, it's "hear hear" .

What about 'Hear Here' !?

Yeah Whatever, NERD!! :P jk Avi..

Mud, I mean this: I love you.

GPL FTW!

Oh and I worked up a quick mockup a while ago for a new Bandamp design (view in firefox please at the moment)

http://www.emptysnow.com/sandbox/bandamp/

I'd personally LOVE to get the chance to lead the design of Bandamp. That would be the coolest experience.

Ok here are my props to Mud put more eloquently:

Mud, you built a site out of nothing, one that serves as a home base for so many musicians. It's given us all a lot more courage and excited us. It's made us better guitarists, singers, rappers, whistlers. You created a community that is so unique on the web -- we're all friends. And for months you've taken our whining and shit about improving the site; not only that, but you didn't just ignore it. You went the extra step, and now you're actually providing BandAMP a way to continue indefinitely even if you're not here. You've had the talent and foresight to build this community and keep it going and I think everyone agrees with me when I say you seriously rock our socks.

Maybe we set up a wiki or seperate forum on BANDAMP.US? Like a dev. section of bandamp?

woah.. a quadruple post... easy, buddy

we had a discussion about doing a wiki once... the final result was that we wanted to wait a bit before doing such a thing

as for the site design... i think your idea is good, but it's not modern enough to capture my attention the way that the current bandamp does.  maybe it's just the color scheme...?  I love web design, personally, but i don't know how much time i can commit to this, recording my music like a normal musician would want to, go to university, work, and have a working relationship with the girlfriend all at the same time :P

i saw a suggestion about using more flash in such a new design, but i'd hesitate to turn the whole thing flash, unless it's done extrememly well and broken up in to segmented movies.  Even at that, I'd like to keep bandamp rather robust in design   we don't wanna go too Flash-y

When i was consulting a bit with entheon, last time we had a bandamp skin-change, it was quite extensive, and really helpful.  We owe a lot to his ideas!  hard to believe that was 2+ years ago... wow.  Anyway.

final answer:  if design gets a revamp, it's gotta be done in the highest class of css coding... we don't want any goofy going on.  looking over your code, ZachBlume, it's a little hard-coded and not very reliant on style-sheets and such.  that's not fatal at the moment, as you're just trying to show us a design idea, but still.  hey, check out the source of the main bandamp page and grab the css sheet that it's linking to.  Entheon and I had a little talk over how bandamp looks right now, and it was really really helpful to analyze the css file to really get a feel for how bandamp was running.

Here's a listing of all the current stylesheets: http://www.bandamp.com/css/

They're fairly well organized (especially forum.css), but definitely could use some cleaning.

Once it's nice and clean, something like csszengarden.com could be done, where people could choose their own theme.

I do think the main page could 'maybe' do with a little revamping, just to make it more slick, modern and eye catching but otherwise I REALLY like how the Amps pages are right now, soft colours , plenty of (white) space a design that's easy on the eye where you can enjoy what is posted with little or no 'other' distractions.
Having tried my hand at a few forum set-ups (Emergency  Forum) I've come to realize that some sites 'have it' while others just don't. It's an absolute art designing a web site. If you were to check out Muds other sites you'd see his general 'style' and approach ; functional, unobtrusive, soft, spacious, easy-going and professional.
I like Mud and I like his sight ! 

Giving bandAmp users (or only members  lol ) the possibility to not only view the site in the design they choose but to also design their own bandAmp (if only with CSS) is an amazing concept, an excellent sales pitch / recruiter and one more brilliant idea to add to the many that would make bandAmp simply unserpassable!
But.....it is a music site and 'design your own' would always be an 'extra commodity' and a lot of work !!??

Tell you what Zach, you design a really cool bandAmp (?related?) site and I'll let you put it up at bandamp.us.
If your looking for experience and publicity of your own ! 

So let me get this clear, it's a misty morning here! ;
      There is a general site wide agreement that 'we' 'the site' do not Digg it, MySpace it, youTube it, Wiki it or any thing publicity wise, in the name of bandAmp, until a certain moment in time has been reached when the site is 'OK' and 'Good to go!' ? Yes? No?

we hesitated about the wiki thing because we didn't want to come off as if we were advertising it yet... there were plenty of small farm defenders, if you will.  people have liked the small community feel that they've had here, and they were afraid to trash it by opening bandamp up to more publicity that would attract (perhaps) TOO many casual, non-interactive users that wouldn't really be contributing to the site at this stage of it's development.

So, short answer to your question, kings:  Yes.  That seems to be the general consensus.

TLS, everything on my page is valid XHTML and CSS. I hardcoded the CSS in only because I got lazy, however it is all valid and semantic XHTML+CSS.

@Kings.

Ever been to a forum like http://www.bungie.net?

That is one busy forum. And I couldn't name you a single member. Not a single member could name me, though I post regularly enough. There's not really a community, you know what I mean?

Not sure if that's really relevant enough to waste your guys' time. But while I'm here, I might as well say,

While I've been here, it seems like BandAMP has evolved into a think-tank kind of thing just as much a music site. As much as I would love to contribute as much as humanly possible, I have no experience in any code of any kind. The old get old, the young get stronger. But I sure like to think. The products of my brain are at your disposal, BandAMP community.

And I thought, with such easy access and user control, we have the question, what is everyone going to DO?
Well I'll tell you what everyone is gonna do, everyone is gonna do everything. As has been sad, Jim will get more emails than he can possibly handle. If there is going to be a big chat meeting, there needs to be some way to limit the amount of overwhelming petitioning for everyone's personal opinion. This site is heading straight for the wonderful land of Democracy, and as we all know, that's the hardest land there is to get to.
Or at least to stay in.

So as much as we all want this to be free-Democracy-everyone-has-an-equal-say, we are gonna need plenty of structure to keep this working smoothly.

Some kind of a Speaker of the House?

This (post) is going on too long.

Wow!  So I don't log in here for a week and a bit and it's all change (well, nearly) for BandAMP... this is good news as far as I'm concerned.
It follows on from months and months of people debating the demise of a great site and a pretty close web community, so from me it's very much a:

THANK YOU MUD

Ok, so here's the update: We've got a lawyer in Seattle who is setting up the Non-Profit Organization (NPO). This part of the process shouldn't take too much time, however, the government has made it difficult for NPO's to gain tax deductibility status in the last twenty years or so (as a result of people trying to evade taxes). SO, what I've heard is it will take an additional 6-8 months AFTER the NPO is setup before it can be approved for tax deductibility. Not much we can do here to speed that process up.

Anyways, just wanted to let you guys know we're working on it!