IMDB is very succesful because not only does it have the most comprehensive
list of movies, and a fan-contributed ratings metric - it has value-adding
information at every step. I don't think CDindex has the potential to
become like IMDB -- 120 minutes of video is a lot more to talk about than
60 minutes of audio... but we can certainly become more valuable than
CDDB, which can't even spell most artist's names consistently.
- We could add a URL table which associates each Artist ID with a group
of URLs and descriptions for those URLs. The URL adding process could be
designed so that there are "caretakers" for major artists to prevent
people from adding pointers directly to questionable sources e.g. illegal
MP3 rips, porn sites etc. Or there could just be a "CDindex is not
responsibile for..." type disclaimer.
- Rob can talk to companies like Amazon about linking to their sales pages
so that it's one click from listening to "Debut" to the CDindex Bjork
page, and two more to get Amazon's deal on "Post" or a Bjork Video.
Rather than a dodgy keyword search like CDDB, we can use a jump straight
from Artist on CDindex to per-Artist results on Amazon. [1]
- We can add more structure to the information about the music. For the
classical music this could offer much more than CDDB - straight off the
back of most classical CDs there's composer, conductor etc. With a little
more effort we can tell people when they're listening to a cover, and
which version of a track is which...
[1] Goodnoise presumably has relationships with music-related people
anyway which might preclude Amazon, but suggest other possibilities...
Nick.