Amazon.com Reveals New Music Site


By Antony Bruno, Billboard

Amazon.com has quietly unveiled a Wikipedia-like music information site called SoundUnwound. The adjunct to its online commerce system allows fans to edit band profiles, album and song information and other music related news and updates.

All edits are first reviewed by Amazon staff before going live. Initial artist information is compiled from Amazon.com editorial reviews, Internet Movie Database and Musicbrainz content.

The site includes music recommendations of similar artists, links to YouTube videos, streaming song clips (which don’t seem to be working at the moment) and links to buy digital tracks through the AmazonMP3 store.

SoundUnwound is in a beta stage at this time. No timeline is available for when the company expects a more formal launch.

Whether or not the world needs it remains to be seen, but obviously market research made it at least look viable. I'll probably keep on using Wiki.

I just looked up the Ramones & Motorhead, figuring that they're two not very mainstream but very seminal acts with 30+ years of recording & performing each.

• They screwed up the Ramones Blurb and Timeline (C.J. joined in '76? Whadda Fuck?) but the Motorhead Blurb looks OK (if so-so; "they were the first metal band to appear on the Jay Leno TV show"? So what. And Robert John for "Similar Artisits is so stupid as to defy categorization) & their Timeline looks good.
  
• I like the embedded YouTube videos (the ability to embed other video players would be nice) and the Amazon sample player is nicer than the AMG sample player.
  
• I hate, Hate, Hate the idea of putting ShoutBox on the artist & music pages; I expect the shouts to overflow with Spam, Dumbasses, Me To-ers and Griefers.
  
• The links to Wikipedia, MBZ & Discogs are nice, but so far the Wikipedia data is too often the basis of the SoundUnwound blurb.

Robert John? The guy who did "Sad Eyes"? THAT Robert John? Compared to Motorhead? I think that goes way beyond stupid into some whole other dimension of "What the?"

Exactly. Unless someone was attempting a surrealist juxtaposition they screwed up badly, but that's to be expected when you're leaving the original postings to 'bots & the updates to Wikipedia dropouts.

site looks pretty lame so far