Great Business Idea (Free to a good home)

While we're on the topic of music aggregators, it seems clear to me that more is always better when it comes to band writeups/background. I love the Rhapsody/iTunes/Napster/YahooMusic model of listening to music, but I almost always want more details on the bands. When I'm listening to a playlist and a song comes on that I like; I want to read more than a few sentences about them. But for anything other than the usual hit artists, that's rarely available. Which suggests a great business, waiting to be built:

    Wikipedia meets Rhapsody

    If anyone's motivated and equipped to flesh out a band's bio and other details, it's its fans (and band members). But unless I'm missing something, none of the major online music services allow this sort of user-contributed content (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong). We're stuck with whatever the service's own editors supply, or whatever one-size-fits-all metadata came with the files. It's rarely enough.

    Part of the reason this isn't offered may be that these services tend to use proprietary client software running locally on your own PC, so the usual web/wiki conventions of open participation may be tricky to implement. But in the age of Ajax, I don't see why that has to be the case. (No doubt DRM has something to do with it. But then why not a web/client combo, that uses a web interface for content and only uses the client for DRM/steaming?)

    A few services, such as MSN Music, which is web-based, allow user reviews, but no more than that. Why not let users write/edit the band bio, discography, tour dates, reviews, essays, influences, pictures, and everything else? It works for Wikipedia, after all; this would just be a fine-sliced version of that, focused only on music.

    Part of the amazing success of MySpace is that it's built on user-created content, including a load of band sites that are controlled by the bands themselves. Indeed, MySpace may be the best one to roll out such a new offering, combining a full-featured music stream/download service that has the same 1m tracks of all the others, along with the peer-production indie music and band sites that has made MySpace such a phenomena already.

    Whether in their hands or someone else's, this is an idea whose time has come. The users want more. And they're ready to help.

Comments

[Anthony Eden]

Something like MusicBrainz (http://musicbrainz.org/)?

-Anthony

[Burkhard]

I agree a music service that does for music what the International Movie Database (imdb.com) does for film would be great.

Did you see Allmusic.com? this comes close to what you're talking about - lots of info, biographical data, discographies etc for many bands, but they basically rely on an editorial staff, only backed up by information sent in by users.

IMDB has more user contributions but still relies heavily on editorial staff as far as i can tell.

[Jean-Philippe Leboeuf]

Seen on KDE and Wikipedia: “amaroK is a sophisticated audioplayer for KDE that provides the user with all kind of contextual information using different webservices. It uses wikipedia to provide the user with details about artists, album and title of the current track if possible.” (screenshot available).
Ideas are always already coded somewhere ;-)

[Mark Wasiel]

It's still in its infancy and is finally getting out of being only a techno/dance/electronic place, but Discogs is starting to become the music Wikipedia.

http://www.discogs.com

It's better than Allmusic because Allmusic only allows one review. Discogs allows multiple reviews and allows everyone to rate it just like imdb. Also Allmusic doesn't cross-reference it's artists to the degree that Discogs does. It's fun to click on an artist (or a producer or engineer or just a backing musician) and see everything that the arist has been on.

If someone could connect this with online listening or just your own mp3 listening by tags, it would be even better. Alternatively, if you could hook discogs up to a music service so you could hear what is in Discogs that would be great too. You'll find that many of the items in Discogs are major long tail though and none of the music services would have them however.

[Ryan Shaw]

Rich, fan-contributed metadata for media content is the core idea behind the MSMDX project. The study described on that site focuses on video content rather than audio, but the same principles apply.

As the commenters above point out, there are services like Musicbrainz and Discogs doing this in the music space. One reason I think they haven't seen wider exposure is that powerful forces like Gracenote are threatening companies who consider working with these open projects, seeing them as a threat to their desired metadata monopoly. Not to mentioned misguided record companies who consider any information related to their properties to be 100% owned by them.

[David Sabel]

While lacking full length previews or a subscription model, upto11.net (http://www.upto11.net) has integrated articles from the Wikipedia about artists, albums and songs with user created tags, playlists and P2P-collection-based recommendations.

You can quickly find a new band, read articles from the Wikipedia about that new band when there is an article and then click through to preview and buy the music from many of the more popular services such as iTunes/Amazon/MSNMusic/BuyMusic.com.

Also, if you see an artist's page with a thin or empty article, you can easily click over to the Wikipedia to edit or start a new article.

[Elana Winsberg]

For Seattle's music scene, Seattle Noise (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/bands/) does just that: invites local bands to upload clips and post bios.

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[Lindsey]

Last fm already has this model; each band/artist listing comes with several paragraphs detailing the band's history, influences and styles, as well as a discography. These can be changed by readers at any point.

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