Why no IMDB for Music?

TailChris Anderson’s Long Tail asks: “Why are the current generation of music services so dumb?”

That’s an interesting question, and there are some counter-intuitive answers. Chris’s frame of reference is IMDB, the fabulous site (owned by Amazon) of enormous utility to film fans.

Its no surprise that someone interested in the Long Tail would be
curious about an algorithm capable of taking mainstream (i.e., short
head) content, and using it to drive consumers toward Long Tail
(less well known) material.

There are a few possible answers to his question, and I expect they will have an impact on technology development in this space. So not only is it relevant to music fans, but its something investors and VCs may want to think about in their longer term perspective. 

Much of what IMDB does for film can be assembled — pieced together really — via many separate pages, apps and services for music. Chris is correct in noting that no single site has managed to do for music what IMDB does for Movies.

There are several reasons why this is so:

1) There is much, much more music than film; Think 30,000 new CDs per year versus a few 100 films;
2) Musical preferences are a much more personal and less communal experience than film; I’ll bet that you can take 4 archetype films, and working off of a database and user surveys, have a high probability of predicting how people will feel about a 5th film. Not so with music. (Much of the time, people will not have even heard of the 5th band);
3) The language of Film is far more accessible — even universal — than that of Music. Our modern era of Irony, since Animal House and Caddyshack, uses film quotes as a shorthand for nearly any situation we encounter.
4)  The lingua franca of Music is so much broader and deeper than film that it encourages smaller niches; Mainstream music, much more so than film, embodies the Short Head (mega hit records) and the Long Tail (lots of small but ardently followed by their fans records).

Given all that, what if we wanted to put together an IMDB – but for Music? We’d have to combine some code from each of the following sites:

Indy Custom Radio (colloborative filter radio)
Mercora Search (MP3 search)
Music Maps (genre studies)
Music Plasma (linking musical influences)
Amazon

Use the recomendation algorithm of Indy Custom Radio with the reach of Mercora; Everyone else gets used for data feeds and to refine the recommendation engine.

Chris has a somewhat different approach:

Allmusic.com (great info, but no streaming, downloading or radio)
MusicBrainz (wiki-style, no music listening)
Last.FM (incorporates audiscrobbler; just radio)
upto11 (no music listening)
Discogs (no music listening)

Also of note are music recommendation services Pandora, MusicStrands, and LivePlasma.

Its amusing to note — right on cue — where the language of Film shows up: upto11. They take their name from a terribly amusing scene in This is Spinal Tap  (when asked why their amps go up to 11: "Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?)

Of course, there was something that already  did EXACTLY what Chris wants: It was called Napster.

Not the in name only present service, but the one that allowed users to peruse other people’s hard drives, and encouraged experimental downloading of other people’s music, based on liking other music on people’s hard drive (Hey, they like A and B and C and D, also — whats this Z? — maybe I’ll like that, too).

Too bad the music industry refused to cannibalize itself when it had the opportunity. They should have put the Napster Cooption Business Model into effect while they had the chance.    

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  1. dsquared commented on Aug 16

    you can add another one; how many films from your teens are you actually embarrassed to ever have liked? How many bands?

  2. yasth commented on Aug 16

    Actually the new Napster allows you to do this. It just isn’t that interesting though, maybe because you can’t self seed, so if you already have the album why bother downloading it, and if you see a show you like well it is polite to buy the CD there, and smart too as you can’t know if it will be on the paid services. So discoveries don’t get acted upon, you get much more what is on the radio, at the moment.

    Of course my days of lost piraterial bliss lie in audiogalaxy, it had a recomnedation system that worked, it made sense most of the time, and it didn’t just become a closed circle like allmusicguide tends to.

  3. theQview commented on Aug 16

    Why is IMDB so limited?

    In A better way to find music, Chris Anderson muses:I want to reorder the world of music my own way, and my way is different from the next guy’s way. In the movie world this is easy, because we’ve got

  4. Webster Hubble Telescope commented on Aug 16

    I get all my “tail” music from the wfmu.org archives. Great search engine that will get at least one hit from every musician you have (n)ever heard of. Of course, you might have to wade through the individual programs, but that’s the fun. BTW, playlists for almost every program.

  5. Rob commented on Aug 18

    With the ruling against Grokster putting a major dent in P2P networks, it will be interesting to see how Weeddex does. Basically it acts much like a P2P network, but it uses digital rights management technology to make sure that copyrighted material stays that way. To help spread content the technology allows for payment to people in the distribution chain as well as the artist. So if someone downloads a Weed song file from me, likes it and pays for it, I will get a cut, Weeddex will get a cut and the artist will get a cut. It could prove to be an interesting development in the music distribution space.

  6. Derek commented on Dec 1

    I agree that the idea of a full music database is a larger undertaking than IMDB, however I don’t beleive this is a reason not to start the process. wikipedia is doing its start for total information (though struggling through some growing pains at this point), and I agree that all music is at least looking in the right direction, however there seems to be something missing.
    I agree, the old napster was the best music database that has been around, period. To bad it isn’t anymore.

  7. PhxTitan commented on Dec 3

    Amazon’s IMDB data base (they bought it), as massively huge as it is, would be downright tiny — microscopic — compared to an equally thorough historical music data base. The music “industry” is exponentially much more participatory, diversified, deeper, wider, with a vastly greater historical head start to boot, than the small by comparison movie industry.

    It would take a combining effort of a music focused Wikipedia, where everybody can contribute their knowledge and passion, mixed with some other data bases to pull off a credible feat, IMHO. Who knows what some genius will start to pull it off. But multitudes will rejoice!

    With time it will happen, but entry verification will be a bitch. Can you just imagine?!

    On previous “IMDB for music” searches, I’ve found what some said were the closest thing, but still no cigar:

    allmusic
    MusicBrainz
    Artist Direct
    SoundtrackNet

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