SoundUnwound Blog

SoundUnwound's Exciting New Changes!

At SoundUnwound, we want to make the most of the information you provide by using it to connect artists and releases within the music world. So we’re delighted to launch our new design, which features a brand new artist page. The new artist page shows each artist’s complete discography better than ever before, and makes it much easier to discover links between musicians.

What are the changes?

•     Our new discography section now includes all releases that an artist has made under his main name, under any pseudonyms, or as a member of a group. It also shows releases which an artist has a credit on so that, for example, you can see everything a producer has produced, or everything a guitarist has played on, even if it’s not released by them.

•     We’ve created a new ‘Collaborations, Groups and Family’ section which makes it easier to see all the other musicians the artist is linked with, and how.

•     We’ve consolidated the biography and the key personal data from the ‘At a glance’ section into the center of the screen.

•     A few of the sections have been moved around to make them easier to find (like the MP3 player!).

The changes above have mainly been applied to artists when viewed in ‘read mode.’ The ‘edit mode’ screen for artists has been left more-or-less the same as before, with just a few changes in color, for example. But the edits you make will have more visible results now.

How do these changes work?

We’ve made all these changes with a handful of difficult examples in mind. Here’s how the new design deals with them:

•      Some artists, such as singer-songwriter Will Oldham, release under lots of different pseudonyms. Our new design keeps all these pseudonyms on one page, so you can see his entire body of work in one place, and view his releases broken down by alias.

•     Some artists, such as Brian Eno, have had lengthy careers that include being a member of a band, having a solo career, releasing albums in collaboration with others, performing on others’ releases, while also being a highly respected producer. We’ve brought all of these strands together, so you can easily view his entire musical career and discover more about him and the artists he's influenced. See also Damon Albarn and Danger Mouse. 

 

•      Some artists, such as Dave Grohl, don’t have much in way of a solo career, but have been prolific in lots of bands. Our new discography allows you to see all that he’s done with Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and more, to give a more complete picture of Grohl’s musical legacy. For similar examples, see also Josh Freese, Johnny Marr or Prince Paul.

The ‘Collaborations, Groups & Family’ section shows you who else the artist has worked with, and how. So, for example, you can clearly see that Kanye West has worked with Jay-Z, The Game, Common, T.I., John Legend and many more artists, and you can click the plus-sign to see exactly how. Quincy Jones’ page shows that he’s worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and many more huge names from jazz, funk and pop - and some lesser known names too. We believe this new feature will provide some fascinating new perspectives from which to discover new music, as determined by the artists’ own inclinations towards similar musical minds.

 

We've been working hard to create a site which makes the best out of the information you provide and we're really excited to get these new features out. If you have any thoughts on the new look and new features, please let us know by sending us feedback.

Well, that's it... for now! We still have a lot to do. We're off to add more features, improve existing pages, and gather more data so that SoundUnwound can become the best music site on the planet! So if you have any ideas on further improvements to the site, or things you'd like to make your contributing easier or more meaningful, we'd certainly appreciate feedback there too.

In the meantime, please take a look around, tell us stuff we don’t yet know about your favorite artists, and discover more great music by new favorite artists!

Thanks!

Team SoundUnwound

Discover new music with a SoundUnwound megamix!

Spring is in the air, and like a pack of over-excitable school children, the team here at SoundUnwound are bounding merrily to the windows to gaze at the sunshine while our poor bosses try to convince us to work. Actually, It's not hard to convince us because we're all rather excited about the progress we've been making with SoundUnwound! Thanks to our new designer Andy, we've got a fantastic new look coming for all our artist pages, which we'll unveil as soon as we can. In the meantime, we're very pleased to now be able to stream MP3 samples directly from an artist's discography.

Through Amazon, SoundUnwound has access to millions of 30 second song samples, but it's sometimes been hard to find them before! Now, look at Beyoncé's discography, and the listen buttons underneath all three of her solo albums allows you to hear 30 second samples of every track from every album! 

If an album has eight or ten or twelve tracks, it takes four or five or six minutes to hear it all - it's like a megamix! Click through to Beyoncé's hubbie Jay-Z and you'll see that all twelve of his studio albums have play buttons - you could sample his entire 13 year career in about an hour! It's so quick and easy, everyone in our office is using it, both to catch up on hot new bands we've read rave reviews about, and to finally hear classic 60s and 70s acts we've never got round to listening to.

Why not give it a go? In the time it takes to listen to one full album, you can hear megamixes of a dozen! We think this is a great way to discover new music, because there are so many recommendations out there, just a little flavor is all you need to work out where to dig deeper. As always, we're still working on improving this feature, but we'd love to hear any feedback from you -  if you're loving it or hating it, or have any other thoughts on the site, please let us know!

Team SoundUnwound

 

Making Editing Easier

Well, it seems that the cold of January has finally given way to …umm, the cold of February.  But hopefully your hearts are still aglow from the love songs shared over Valentine’s Day. We are certainly feeling the love from y’all in all the comments and feedback you’re sending us. As part of this, we’ve recognized that providing the information you want isn’t always as easy as it could be, so we’ve been working away backstage to make contributing to our site easier. A good example is the way we now allow you to paste in an Amazon URL from any Amazon site (worldwide!) when you see a release that we’re missing:

Can't find that new dance record your friends are all talking about? Just paste in the Amazon URL where you found it and we’ll take care of the rest! We’ll pull in as much information as we can – cover, release date, label, track listings, reviews and anything else we can lay our hands on. The best part is that we give you credit for all the pieces of information we can drag in, so you get extra points for less work!

So check out and compare the Polyphonic Spree page on Amazon to SoundUnwound and locate any missing releases. How about “The Boss” himself – Bruce Springsteen (Amazon / SoundUnwound) ? 

While we hope you like these kinds of changes, we feel there is always room for improvement. So let us know about other ways that we can help you contribute to the site. What things do you find yourself doing repeatedly that we could help with? Can we make your editing more productive, or more fun? Just send us your feedback and we’ll do what we can to help you share and expand the world of music. 

 The SoundUnwound Team

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Yeah, so we're halfway through January already, but we can still say it! Sorry for not being better bloggers, but we have been very busy. Our first New Year's resolution is to keep in touch with you on a more regular basis so you know what we're up to! So, what have we been doing? Before the turkey and the presents and the parties, we were rounding off our debut year. SoundUnwound Beta launched in September 2008, and it's been a great journey so far. So we have to say a huge big thank you, with bear-sized hugs, for all the effort you've put in contributing to our little adventure. This musical universe we're building is more than 130,000 parts better than it was in September, thanks to all your editing work!

Thanks to you, we now know:

• What every one of the ten international versions of Led Zeppelin's Black Dog looked like;
• How The Temptations lineup shifted and shook throughout their history;
• That the Tibetan Freedom Concert release had 68 writers, 9 engineers, 70 composers, 2 designers, 118 performers, 1 conductor, 1 creator, 1 arranger and 2 producers including Sylvia Massy who also produced 1993’s massive Undertow by Tool;
• And just everything there is to know about Adam Faith!

We’re hopping up and down with excitement - as well as poor attempts at breakdancing on our linoleum floor – about the stuff we have planned for 2009. We're always growing and we can't wait to see how SoundUnwound will develop into 2010 and beyond! But that won't happen if we close our eyes and ears, so we’re always listening to your comments and we’ll be making improvements to the site accordingly, in all kinds of areas – from navigation and discovery, to the color of the Top Editor stars.

We’re glad to have you along on this journey and we look forward to your feedback as you help guide us to create the single greatest music website on the net! That's our second New Year's resolution, and it's one we definitely feel we can achieve with your help.

Are you sitting comfortably ? Then we’ll begin… 2009.

We've been listening…

…to the special 20th anniversary edition of U2's classic The Joshua Tree in SoundUnwound HQ lately, and it's got us wondering: has Bono found what he's looking for yet? He has climbed the highest mountains, he has run through the fields, but you've got to hope that sometime in the last two decades he's stumbled upon whatever it is he's been searching for; otherwise it's been a big waste of time. Bono's never-ending mission gave us inspiration, so we're delighted to say it's now easier than ever to find what you're looking for on SoundUnwound.

The birthname and nicknames fields on contributor pages now take on more import, as do the tracks listed for every release, as all these fields are now included in the main search. Give it a shot: look for Reginald Dwight and we'll present you with Elton John, of course; The King of Pop gives you Michael Jackson, obviously; and Summertime gives you over 5000 matches, because the Gershwin song is one of the most covered in history; from here you can look through thousands of releases it appears on to find the version you want.

What's more, we've added a 'Genres' section to the top of the search results page, which should make it much easier to find the genre pages we've built, or to add your own. Search for rock and you'll get… huh, a lot of different types of rock music. Have we forgotten anything? We can't see any gaps but if you can, click add new genre and tell us about it!

We've made another important change: we've added music to SoundUnwound! Well, we've have always had MP3 streaming from the Amazon.com download store on release pages, but it wasn't always easy to find. We've rectified that by putting a MP3 widget on the contributor page (just above the YouTube video) to make it easy to sample the artists you're interested in.

Finally for now, we've made a change to the editing interface, making it easier to change the name of a page. Previously, pages could be re-titled from within the 'At a glance' section, but we've now moved the editing field up to the title itself: just scroll over the main headline while in edit mode and you can suggest a change. This seems to us to be more intuitive, so we hope it makes it easier for you to contribute.

We might be wrong, though, so please let us know. We'd always like to know if you like our recent changes, or if there are any others you'd like to see. You can tell us by commenting on this blog post, or by clicking Send feedback on any SoundUnwound page. Whether you're Paul David Hewson the rock star, or Paul the plumber, we'll keep listening to you!

Team SoundUnwound

The nights are drawing in...

...Fall has given way to Winter, and at SoundUnwound HQ we've been discarding our crew T-shirts in favor of wooly fleeces and scarves. As the cold begins to bite, we've been working hard indoors squashing bugs, introducing new features and improving old ones, and laying down the groundwork for some awesome future developments. Much of our work has been behind-the-scenes, boring kinda stuff, but the attentive among you might've noticed these recent front-of-house improvements:

· Viewpoint reviews on release pages

Many of our release pages now show customer reviews taken from Amazon.com; while in 'edit mode, simply add an appropriate ASIN to the 'At a glance' section of a release and we'll do the rest. (The ASIN is the 10-digit code located in the Product Details section of every Amazon product page). We use the ASIN to pull through the best positive review and the best negative review to act as a counterpoint. Which do you agree with? 

· Parent and child record labels on label pages

A wise man once said "No man is an island, unless his name is Madagascar." Similarly, no record label is an island, unless its name is Island, or it's an independent. In reality record labels weave a complex web of associations, so we've added 'parent' and 'sub-label' fields to the 'At a glance' sections of record label pages so that we can begin to build them into an appropriate hierarchy.

· Block for videos

We search YouTube for appropriate videos for every page, but sometimes the results aren't what we want. This is particularly the case for artists who share a name with a more famous artist, song, or just a regular word. Now we have a 'block' feature so you can specify videos which don’t fit the bill, and soon we'll introduce more refinements to improve our video selection.

· New batch of genre profiles

Our moderation team have been hard at work writing profiles for some of our hundreds of genre pages. Hard Rock is "the domain of men who are men and women who wear bikinis," New Age is "ambient music aimed at assisting meditation, sleep or spirituality," and Funk is "the rhythmic arm of soul music, and the building block upon which much of modern dance music has been built." Disagree? Then feel free to edit them, or add a profile for one of the genres we haven't covered yet.

We've processed over 80,000 edits since launching our online Beta two months ago, and each and every change has improved the site to everyone's benefit. We've got lots more planned too, so stay tuned!

Team SoundUnwound

Introducing... the SoundUnwound Hot New Features Chart!

Billboard haven't accepted it yet, but SoundUnwound has a new chart for all you list-happy music fans -- the SoundUnwound Hot New Features Chart!  We’ve been listening to all your feedback, and as well as squashing a few little bugs here and there, we've been adding new features just like you've asked us to. So here's this week's Top 5 countdown:

At 5, is "Can I Change My Username?" by The Oops Group. Yeah, no problem! Now just click the 'My Page' link at the top-right of your screen -- where you can see all your recent editing history -- and from there you can now call yourself whatever you like!

In at No.4 is "Release Types (More, More, More)" by the Discography Cleaners. We've added 'bootleg' and 'karaoke' to the standard release types to account for all the unofficial and karaoke releases in our database; we think these are definitely helpful to have around, but not entirely suitable for an artist's main discography. Now we can file 'em away better and keep everyone happy!

No.3 for the week is "We Don't Use Amazon.com", by The Europeans. So we've responded to make SoundUnwound more internationally friendly by allowing ASINs from several other Amazon sites to be added to a release page. This means we can automatically import more cover art and track-listings from across the world, and it gives us loads more possibilities to play with in the future.

Pulling up to the bumper at No.2 is "Where Can I Write About This Release?" by The Gaps Band. We already had a 'Profile' section for artists and record labels, but we forgot to provide a space on release pages for you to give some background or other details. Now, we have 'Overview', so you can write away right away!

And the No.1 feedback request that we've followed up this week is "You Don't Have Enough Genres" by The Undergrounds! Congratulations, thanks to your efforts to let us know about hip-hop and metal related sub-genres we’d never heard of before, we've now made it possible to add any genre we don't already have. Just go to an artist's page, click on our newly designed 'Vote On Genres' button, and type it in -- if we don't have it, you can add it! Of course, if you make up something silly, our moderators might catch it -- so please try to provide a source. But we're really keen for SoundUnwound to be comprehensive, and that's why we've given you this tool to help us.

But this isn't all we've been doing. In fact, there's one much bigger new feature you've been asking for which we hope will launch straight to No.1 in our charts in the next week or two. So stay tuned, keep looking around and editing, and let us know if there's anything else you'd like to see in the SoundUnwound Hot New Features Chart!

Until the next time,

Team SoundUnwound

Funny How Time Flies (When You're Having Fun)

We can hardly believe we’ve been live for a whole month – and what a month! Team SoundUnwound has been busy, but so have you. During October you made thousands of fantastic edits, and our top contributor Brigid, has singlehandedly contributed an amazing 10,000+ changes. Thank you Brigid, you’re keeping our moderators busy, and they love it!

But it doesn’t matter if you make 10 edits or 10 thousand, we’re all in this together, and together we are adding our knowledge, plumping up the pages and helping to make SoundUnwound the place for music lovers to be, whether you’re looking, researching and exploring, or editing like crazy.

However, it seems you’re not just content with hunting around the musiverse and making changes. Lots of you have been getting in touch via the feedback link. You’ve been telling us about bugs, letting us know when things seem a little quirky and sending in tonnes of great suggestions. It’s been really great to hear from so many of you and we’ve been adding all your wonderful ideas to our big cookpot of plans for the future. It’s bubbling away nicely, we should be able to bring lots of good things to the table over the next few months. Who knows, some of the features might even be yours! Watch this space, we’ll give you an update about all the cool stuff we’ve been adding in the next blog post.

Anyway, keep it coming people, it’s all great stuff. We’re so glad you’re visiting and helping us to make SoundUnwound such a fantastic place to be.

There’s loads to do, we’d better get back to work! See you round the site.

Team SoundUnwound

And a Week Flies By!

The first thing we want to say is a huge "thank you" to the thousands of users who've swung by to take a look -- and particularly to all of you who popped into edit mode to make things better. We're so excited you came and we're working hard to moderate all of your changes (more than ten thousand already!) into the site just as quickly as we can. Look at the difference you've already made to Nine Inch Nails and how much good you've done for Led Zeppelin! You also added hundreds of new artists and releases to the system and have improved the genres on thousands of pages -- way to go, team! You have our most effusive thanks for your efforts and we love you deeply :)

We also want to thank you for all your feedback -- we read every single piece of it and we're totally focused on adding more of what you want to SoundUnwound. We've put up a list over at UnSpun of ideas for things we might do next and we were hoping you might come, contribute and help direct the future of the SoundUnwound universe. We're not making promises, but there's no-one we want to please more than you, so let your voice be heard!

It might not look it, but we've been super-busy behind the scenes over here at SoundUnwound HQ making the world a better place -- well, our corner of it at least! We've been squashing bugs by the dozen though we know we're still not done -- please drop us some feedback if you see anything freaky and we'll get right on it.

Oh, and one more thing: we've just posted thousands of new images to pretty up the site -- check out Jack White from the White Stripes and the Wu-Tang Clan for some samples. We're busy searching the length and breadth of the internet for more useful stuff we can integrate -- if you have any specific suggestions for places we might get hold of data, just let us know.

Well, that's all for today. Team SoundUnwound signing off.

And the Lights Go Up on SoundUnwound!

Hey I can’t see a thing! Can you turn those back down?

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!

We built SoundUnwound for music fans like you, so put your hands up in the air and scream - or, if you’re feeling a little more refined, have a look around, edit the world into a better place, and send us your feedback. One last thing: today is our first big gig, so please go gentle on us and excuse any slackness as we get to grips with it being show-time for real!

Thanks!

The SoundUnwound Team

SoundUnwound makes exploration and discovery fun

So far we’ve got a bunch of ways to navigate the vast music universe with more to come:

• Explore connections between artists - band memberships, family, shared credits and more.
• Visualize timelines for artists with our interactive discography.
• Discover similar artists and releases by genre and Amazon purchase data
• Experience new artists through photos, videos and music clips

SoundUnwound is editable by anyone

We’ve made a start on getting things straight on our pages, but the world of music is huge and ever changing. We know there’ll be things missing or wrong - you can fix it!

• Click "edit" at the top of almost any SoundUnwound page to switch into edit mode
• You’ll now see extra options to correct or add details all over most SoundUnwound pages - just move your mouse over what you want to edit
• Vote on genres for artists and releases - check out the genres at the top of Stevie Wonder’s page, or Coldplay’s Parachutes. Disagree? Just click "Have your say!"