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If you are building any sort of music search system, sooner or later you are going to need a good source for music metadata such as artist, albums, tracks, related artists, biographies, reviews, album art etc. One of the first places to look for good metadata is the All Music Guide. AMG has been in the business of supplying music metadata since 1992. The AMG database is probably one of the most complete database. They provide detailed artist biographies, discographies, group membership, similar artists, influences, song covers and much more. There's a whole lot there. However, it is a commercial database. There's no free access to the data except via the website. If you want access to the data you have to get a license from AMG and it is not cheap. You could probably buy about 30 Sun Ultra 20s for what you'd pay for a year's access to the AMG database.

The All Music guide is the Cadillac of music metadata. It has all of the data that you'd ever want, but you have to pay for it.