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!"

Comments

[Paul]

Congrats to the SoundUnwound team - I am excited by what you've done so far. It looks great. It's great to see all that Musicbrainz and IMDB data put to good use.

I hope that you'll think a bit about a more friendly license for the data (especially the user contributed data). It seems to me that crowd-sourced data should be released under a creative-commons or other free-to-use license.

Also, I'd love to see you folks build some web-services around this data to make it easier for 3rd parties to use the data.

And finally, I'm big fan of social tags as applied to music - any plans to allow and encourage social tagging of items?

Again, great job - I hope this catches on with the world.

[largehearted boy]

This looks very interesting and could be a valuable resource for music fans. Good luck.

[Will]

Excellent! I am most keen on providing high quality cover art scans for some albums where covers are lacking in quality or are entirely absent. I've upped a few to soundunwound already, and lacking any FAQ on what your ideal specs are in terms of what size you want to receive (pixels x pixels), I decided to provide 800 x 800, which is both screen-friendly and happens to be the largest size image that iTunes can currently import (so it seemed it would be the most useful to anyone searching for a cover to display on their iPod).

[Luis]

Really digging this. Good job, guys! Will there be an API? RSS feeds?

[raphedz]

you are great...am impresssed at this.

[Dan]

Regarding the site's automatic message of -- "Cannot delete Amazon.com image: This image comes from an Amazon.com ASIN and cannot be deleted. If this image is incorrect, please correct the Amazon.com ASINs" -- you should make it possible to delete the Amazon.com image when a superior image has been provided, since oftentimes the Amazon image is tiny, blurry, or otherwise unpleasant. Or at least, lets the mods do it.

[Ramo]

Well Done. Wish you all the good luck

[Deckard]

There is inconsistent moderation of profiles excerpted from Wikipedia. Many of the Soundunwound artist pages have profiles derived from Wikipedia and carry a footnote stating "The profile above is derived from [wikipedia]. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this profile under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation." Yet your moderators also reject profiles excerpted from Wikipedia that users try to add. Some sort of FAQ seems in order to set both users and moderators on the same path.

[ZosoJade]

The simple solution is to stop using Wikipedia altogether and simply write up a completely different biography, using a variety of different sources. I find Wikipedia to be very unreliable anyway.

[Deckard]

Yes but realistically facts are facts and there's only so many ways to write up a brief bio. Does rearranging some words really make something original, when it is reporting facts? Nope.

[rebelmix]

a number of release i looked up only have links to the physical release, even when the digital version is in the Amazon store also