[mb-users] "The need for free and open music metadata", but MB not good enough

[Jim DeLaHunt]

Hi folks,

I'm back at MusicBrainz after a couple of months paying attention to other
projects. (Amazing, the mb-style list didn't clean up all the rest of the
CSG while I was away. I still get to play.)

I found an interesting blog post by a music web entrepreneur here in
Vancouver, David Gratton.

"The need for free and open music metadata" (February 19, 2008)
<http://www.davidrdgratton.com/blog/the-need-for-free-and-open-music-metadata>
"Non-profits are simply the stable entity for offering metadata, whereas
private companies will be inherently unstable. Music metadata is factual
content about known items. As such the cost of acquisition of this data is
quite low and falling. The price of metadata, like that of music will
approach 'near free'."

Very validating for those of us contributing to MusicBrainz.  

But read on: "Why didn’t Music Brainz make it as the default service?
It was staffed by wonderful, incredibly smart, and committed people who
understand the need for a free and open metadata service. However, in my
opinion Music Brainz is simply way to complex, tedious, and time consuming
to update. Wikipedia on the other hand is dead simple. End of story.
However, the Music Brainz still has a lot to offer as we discovered."

Hence, he intends to make his own: "So to solve this problem we have taken
Wikipedia and joined it to Music Brainz to get structured Wikipedia music
metadata. That’s cool and useful. At least we think it is. We will be
offering it as a free 'for commercial use' Web service in a few months...."

David Gratton is a thoughtful guy. After I met him, I added his blog to my
daily reading list.  I like what he's trying to do with his Project Opus. 
Thus I was disappointed to hear that he thought the way ahead was to make
something different from MusicBrainz instead of contributing to MusicBrainz
itself. It made me stop and think about what it is about MusicBrainz that
causes him to write it off as "way [too] complex, tedious, and time
consuming to update".

One of my ambitions is to make MusicBrainz a little simpler, easier, and
faster to update.

-----
     -- http://jdlh.com/ Jim DeLaHunt , Vancouver, Canada  • 
http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/JimDeLaHunt

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