SoundUnwound - Amazon's wiki-style music metadatbase
Today Amazon has launched the beta of SoundUnwound - a music web site that looks to be the Wikipedia of music data. SoundUnwound is combining data from IMDB, Amazon and Musicbrainz along with user-contributed data to serve as a one stop site for all the information you could ever want about an artist, album, track, or label.
Already SoundUnwound has lots of interesting data - multiple genre classifications for an artist, detailed profiles, discographies, info on artist members, similar artists, trivia. They have a very nice artist timeline. Here's a subset of the Beatles timeline:
Although SoundUnwound is relying on users to contribute content, they don't seem to be ready to trust all of the data to their users. User edits are reviewed by the SoundUnwound staff before they become official and seen by everyone.
Unfortunately, unlike Wikipedia or Musicbrainz, the data that SoundUnwound collects is not going to be freely available - there's no creative commons license. I am skeptical about any wiki-style site that doesn't make the user-contributed data freely available.
Except for the licensing, I am really excited about SoundUnwound - but I have a few suggestions that could make it really great:
- Build web services around the data so any 3rd party can get this structured data
- Include access to 30 second clips in these web services
- Make it easy to go between ASINs, MusicBrainz IDs, and SoundUnwound IDs
- Add support for social tags