Foosic - the living music database
Foosic is a barebones Audioscrobbler
clone - it is an aggregator for song plays. Foosic provides a
plugin for a (small) number of players that will send your play history
back to foosic where they collect this data in a database. Using
this data, foosic offers charts on popular songs, artists, songs and
genres and active users. They don't offer any sort of
recommendations, they don't try to match you up with similar users, they
don't offer to sell you concert tickets for your favorite bands - all
foosic does is collect the playing history for lots of people and show
some very basic charts.
In some ways, I like the singularity of purpose of foosic - going to one of the leading Music 2.0 sites such as last.fm, iLike or qloud - is like going to Yahoo - there are twenty things on the home page, all shouting for your attention - going to foosic is like going to Google - the page is clean - nothing is shouting at you - the things you can do on the site are few and obvious.
Still, for a song play aggregator such as foosic, there has to be a compelling reason for people to want to go to the trouble of downloading and installing a plugin - I can't see any value a foosic contributor gets from foosic beyond seeing summary stats for their listening habits (which iTunes can duplicate pretty well), or knowing that they are contributing to a larger stats pool. Perhaps foosic will add features in the future that will give me a reason for wanting to install the plugin.
Like most companies in this space, foosic faces the problem of bad metadata. Songs are mislabeled or missing, artists are misspelled - genres are inconsistent. To deal with this problem foosic has chosen to develop their own audio fingerprinting system - so they can unambiguously identify a track and assign it clean metadata. I find it puzzling that they've decided to create their own system when the MusicDNS / MusicBrainz system solves their problem so handily. Foosic would have a much better chance of cleaning up their data with the MusicDNS system - they could resolve each track to a MusicBrainz ID and retrieve good clean metadata via the MusicBrainz api. Right now, foosic has 6 different spellings for 'Emerson, Lake and Palmer' and a dozen or so spellings of 'The Beatles'.
Despite
its somewhat low profile, foosic has collected quite a bit of data in
its first 9 months of operation. It has nearly 4,000 users, nearly 6
million submissions and data on 1.5 million tracks. According to
its submission statistics page, foosic is averaging about 9 submissions a
minute. This is pretty valuable data and foosic will likely be
able to some interesting things with it. Foosic may have some
scaling issues though - it takes 20 seconds to bring up the Top Songs
page. 20 seconds is an eternity on the web.
Foosic isn't the first song play aggregator - Audioscrobbler/last.fm has a 5 year head start, Google Music trends
has a brand name that will attract users - so I have to wonder what
foosic is going to do to distinguish itself from these other services.
It is still early days for foosic - I'm interested in seeing
where it goes.