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A few months ago, I had one of those 'oh crap!' moments - I was working on Snapp Radio, my mashup of music and photos - when someone sent me an email with that contained just a URL: http://www.sleevenotez.com/.  I took  a quick look at their site and saw to my increasing dread that they were making a mashup that seemed to be very similar to Snapp Radio - while you listen to music they would show related information about what you were listening to.  Looking a little closer - I realized that what sleevenotez was doing is very different than Snapp Radio - Snapp Radio is a lean-back interface - it is meant to be something that you enjoy in the background - sort of a relaxing backdrop to your music - something you could use while you are taking a bath whereas sleevenotez is a lean-forward type of interface - something you use when you want to be actively engaged with your music.

Sleevenotez is a music companion website. Their byline is 'reatime info for your digital music'.  While you listen to music Sleevenotez will scurry off to various corners of the web to collect information about the artist and song you are listening too, and display it - providing a single page that gives you just about everything you'd want to know about an artist.  Sleevenotez currently shows you:

• Artist biography - from the wikipedia
• Discography -  from MusicBrainz
• CDs for Sale -  from Amazon
• Photos of the artists - from Flickr
• Videos of the artists - from YouTube
• Lyrics for the song - from Lyrc.com.ar

Sleevenotez determines what your are currently listening to using the last.fm audioscrobbler 'now playing' feed.  Thus there are a total 7 services combined by sleevenotez to build the artist/song page.  You can also use sleevenotez to quickly aggregate information about an artist even if you are not listening to a song - they have an easy to understand URL syntax - so its easy to just plug in a URL like http://www.sleevenotez.com/artist/weezer to bring up all of the information about Weezer.

The Sleevenotez team have an excellent design sense - they have all of the Web 2.0 design goodness - pleasing color selections, curved borders, killer logo,  fading transitions - it is really quite a slick interface - very polished for an alpha release - a very pleasing experience all the way around. The information that they present is well organized,  tt's  not overdone, there's no ajax for ajax sake - the sleevenotez teams shows they have great design chops.

Sleevenotez is an alpha and as such there are a few problems.  The biggest problem right now is that the 'realtime info' is delayed by several minutes - if you are listening to a song, the info for the song doesn't appear until the song is nearly over.  This is an unfortunate side effect of using the last.fm web audioscrobbler web service - tracks are only scrobbled by the scrobbler when they have played for at least a certain amount of time (usually at least 50%).  The result is that sleevenotez is always behind by a couple of minutes.  The sleevenotez team is well aware of this issue - and have a plan to fix this (but this relies on some changes in how last.fm does things) that may take a while before this gets sorted out.

 Sleevenotez does on occasion have some trouble finding the right data - sometimes it will show wrong information in the bio section - data about the Buddist notion of trancendental happiness instead of a biography of a Seattle rock band, or punt on the lyrics, or show non-related photos - it is hard to get this right - try finding photos on Flickr for the band 'blur' - but since this is an alpha, we can cut sleevenotez some slack, I'm sure they'll improve this over time.

Ultimately sleevenotez may have a bigger problem with their business model - many of the webservices that they rely on - last.fm and flickr for instance - have terms-of-service that allow for non-commercial use of the services. Sooner or later sleevenotez may start making money with their site - via Amazon referrers or advertising (they may already be doing that now) - when that happens they'll have to make commercial arrangements with their data providers to avoid violating the terms-of-service - and that may be quite difficult.  For now, most companies are content to look the other way and let people mashup their data - its all part of growing an ecosystem around one's data - it certainly can help companies like last.fm for instance if alternative interfaces spring up that ultimately drive people to use the last.fm plugin - but last.fm may also get a bit chuffed if a site like sleevenotez starts to siphon away Amazon referrers - it would only take a 'cease-and-desist' letter from a last.fm lawyer (or do they call them solicitors over there?) to make the house of cards come tumbling down. 

The sleevenotez team has been blogging about sleevenotez development - they are agile developers and have even gone so far as to put some of their agile process data in their blog - here's iteration #1. I  like that open development model. 

I'm really excited to see sleevenotez - it's a great mashup - and a very useful music companion.  I'm guessing the sleevenotez team will continue to add more data to set of info shown for an artist and song - album reviews, related artists, social tags, playlists,  upcoming concerts - anything you'd want to know about an artist.  Once they get the alpha kinks out of the system - the scrobbler-delay - and the misguided data  - sleevenotez will be one of the best ways to learn more about the artists that perform our favorite music.  It will be interesting too, to see how they navigate through the uncharted legal territory of trying to build  a business on top of mashup webservices.