[mb-users] Where is the IMDb of music

[Lars Aronsson]

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, wrote a book, "The Long Tail", 
that you might have heard of.  It was released a year ago, and 
talks about how the many lesser-known titles in books, films and 
music, the "long tail" of non-best sellers, can now find their 
market through the Internet, which they never did through 
traditional bookstores, movie theatres or record stores.  There 
have been massive amounts of hype around this book.

One year ago, the author gave a presentation at the Google 
headquarters, which is now available in video on YouTube. If you 
go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibzF_7gSjyI
and wind forward to the timestamp 20:00 and listen for two and a 
half minutes, this is an unauthorized transcript (man, Youtube.com 
is a poor tool for transcribing stuff!) of what he says:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

>From http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibzF_7gSjyI
at timestamps given in brackets

[20:00] Google dominates traditional search, but now we have 
vertical search: images, maps, etc. etc. and also video: Youtube. 
You know, for blog search, that's probably Technorati or somebody 
else.

[20:09] It turns out, just because you dominate the economical, 
big marketplace, it doesn't mean you're necessarily going to 
dominate all the verticals. I think the big opportunity going 
forward is to find vertical marketplaces for content products that 
aren't well served by the one-size, fits-all model. And I'm going 
to give you one example.

[20:28] If I were going to start a business right now, it would be 
a classical music service.  Classical music is pathetically 
underserved today in the rich fo[...] market. It's one of the 
largest areas in iTunes, not because the demographic, but because 
the people who are into classical music are so poorly served. It's 
the only place you can get music.

[20:51] Let me just finish the example, so you can understand how 
bad a problem it is. It's a metadata problem. The presentational 
form for music is based on the lowest common demoninator metadata 
available on all the datasets that come into companies like 
iTunes.

[21:06] That's the pop model: You've got band, track, album, and 
sometimes label, but not always. For classical of course, that's 
meaningless. You want composer, conductor, soloist, lead violin, 
town of the ... you can think of any number of ones.  And none of 
those are available.

[21:24] And that's the one of the problems with MP3 players. They 
don't even have a space for metadata fields like that on an iPod. 
So classical, despite being popular on iTunes, is actually quite 
poorly served for presentational form on iTunes.

[21:37] You can imagine: What if there was an iTunes that was just 
set up for classical, or one that was just set up for jazz, for 
example.  For jazz it's not the band so much, as it is the 
individual performers.

[21:47] Like on IMDb, being able to sort by, seeing all the 
scenographer's movies or screenwriter's movies. Every one of those 
metadata fields are clickable, sortable, and you can reorganize 
the entire marketplace along that. This is populated, peer 
production populated, those metadata fields are all created by 
fans of movies who submit the information.

[22:05] And the question is where is the IMDb of music? Where is 
the Wiki-Music?  Where is the music sites that actually have all 
this abundance of information that is meaningful to some of us?

[22:18] I went to the DC punk scene. Why can't I sort on the DC 
1980s? That information is out there.

[22:27] I think that is an opportunity for companies to build 
marketplaces that specialize in these verticals.

[22:34]

END OF TRANSCRIPT.

I can see two things coming out of this: One is informing Chris 
Anderson that MusicBrainz does exist, so instead of asking such 
questions he starts to promote the project.  The other is maybe 
shaping up the way MusicBrainz presents metadata for classical and 
jazz music.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se