Amazon Debuts SoundUnwound Music Wiki
Amazon has taken a page from the Wikipedia playbook and launched SoundUnwound, a user generated music information site. They’ve gotten the ball rolling with info from their own retail site, IDMB and a few other sources and their own music staff will add to the efforts. But for the most part though the site is user generated. In typical Amazon fashion, however, they maintain far more control than Wikipedia. Most info will be filtered through editors (at least until you are a vetted poster) and no one can re-publish the info you’re sharing for free.
My guess is that the end game is to integrate the info – if it proves worthy – onto the retail site; thus providing a richer consumer experience. Amazon already shares consumer reviews below each release on its main site.
This info is already abundant in other corners of the web, such as Wikia’s own music wiki web of sites.
What annoys me most about this is that their content is not released under any sort of “copy-left” agreement such as the GFDL, as is customary with user-generated wikis. It appears that they are claiming the work as their exclusive content. I understand that they have paid staff contributing to it, but claiming the property of crowd-sourcing efforts by earnest fans seems like douchebaggery to me.
I’ve been developing a music industry wiki for aggregation of venues, publicists, networking tools, and anything else that helps musicians, and it’s all GDFL. Meaning anyone can use the content as they wish, basically.
With all this focus on the listeners / end-users, we seem to be neglecting the industry itself. Please help us bring it into the wiki era…