There is actually, in my opinion, quite a lot of opportunity here for
commercial extensions of freely available data. Back when CDDB was
first considering its licencing options, my friend and I looked at
publishing a CDDB server (or additions to the CDDB 'extended data'
field) which added a URL to each entry for major acts or albums.
The idea would be something like "The Mining Company" (http://
www.miningco.com) where you become the "caretaker" for your particular
area of interest (in this case a music artist), with almost endless
merchandising (with cdnow), cross-marketing (i.e. on an Orb page put up
ads for Underworld), and so on opporunities. The most work would be
getting CD player authors to implement the ability to launch URLs out
of the extended data.
This is still an option for CDindex - assuming the data goes the
direction of the GNU Artistic Licence or something like it.
All of this is neither here nor there. Trust is an issue, though it
can often reduce to trusting the individual that runs the CDIndex
server (e.g. cdindex.miningco.com).
/Steve