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
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
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.
...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
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!
