Music is a Product
In Shopify, music is a product. Different formats should be variants of that product, not different products. There are two main types of variants that we use, and this is probably true for you as well: Physical Music and Digital Music.
Properties
In order to differentiate between the two, we'll first need to create some custom Properties. Shopify allows for up to 3 custom properties, and we'll have to use all three.
- FORMAT - what version is the customer buying, CD, Vinyl, 2xLP, etc.
- NAME - what is the name of the thing they're buying. If Physical, this is the name of the release. If digital, this is the name of the song.
- AUDIO - a url to your mp3 clip (IMPORTANT - whatever you link to can be grabbed right from the page, so don't link the whole song, link to a snippet)
Here's what it will look like once you get it set up: http://screencast.com/t/Dlt3JJd8Lgho
Once you do that, then you're product variants will look like this: http://screencast.com/t/DU9W6JgPdG
Templates
Another critical part of this is the template you use. In order to render the player and tracklisting, you'll need to use the template with this code. I've created it as a separate template rather than baking it into your main template so you have flexibility to create different layouts for different products. See here: http://screencast.com/t/HxKPF3wJ
HTML, CSS, Liquid
You'll undoubtedly want to customize this further to fit your look and feel. You can direct your developers here to get a look at exactly what the code looks like and how it works, and then they can find it in your template and make the necessary changes.