Blogs

Amazon.com and IMDb have teamed up to launch an online music encyclopedia.

Content on the site, SoundUnwound, is vetted by Amazon staff but editable by anyone, ala Wikipedia. It draws connections between artists and their family members and uses Amazon purchase data to draw links between artists and genres.

(IMDb is the Internet Movie Database, which contains facts and trivia about movies and television shows. Amazon owns the company.)

Users sign in to SoundUnwound to make changes using their Amazon.com accounts. People who don't have an Amazon.com shopping account must create one to make changes on SoundUnwound.

Says the SoundUnwound Team on its blog:

So, here we are at last! We've tuned up, finished our soundcheck and now we're ready to invite you to meet SoundUnwound - the new music site from IMDb and Amazon. We've got pages on stacks of bands, releases and record companies, from Aaliyah to ZZ Top.

We've got fab ways to explore the super-connected music universe. Best of all, if anything's wrong or missing, then you can fix it in a jiffy with our groovy edit mode!

Initial data on the site came from Amazon's music catalog, MusicBrainz, Mechanical Turk workers and Amazon editors, the company said.

Notes Eliot Van Buskirk on the Wired blog:

Ultimately, the potential success of SoundUnwound depends on creating a loyal, enthusiastic community. Wikipedia will likely always contain more information than SoundUnwound, but Amazon staff might be able to shape user-provided information in such a way that some prefer it for musical research.

And when they find something they like, a row of Amazon "buy" buttons awaits.

(I learned about this from Northwest Innovation.)