Amazon SoundUnwound - Take control of your page

Amazon and IMDb have launched a new service - SoundUnwound, a service that allows people to ‘explore’ music while allowing anyone to edit the database. A bit like Wikipedia and IMDb, and an earlier service called MusicBrainz.

IMDb allows people to read and discover movies they might like to watch. MusicBrainz is a community database for music that works of CDs. The most often use of Musicbrainz is to help people update tags on the digitised music collection. Most mp3 players on computers connect to MusicBrainz to get you the tags for a track, and people can update these tags if they find them broken.

So what does SoundUnwound provide, and what does it mean for musicians? Can musicians use it to have another public page, and why?

Lets first look at what SoundUnwound provides. From the service’s front page it is clear that it helps people ‘explore’ music, and also ’share’ your knowledge. So lets see how it works for a user.

1. Search for an artist, genre and find related artists - The search results are quite comprehensive already. Here’s the search results for U2.
2. Artist Public page - Has a wide range of interesting information. An artist’s public page shows the timeline, trivia, a list of sites of the artist, link to pages for band members and even youTube videos available for the artist. Check out the U2 page on SoundUnwound.(The youTube videos are broken for sure check out vidoes on Prince’s page)
3. Timeline - This is quite a neat little tool. Look at U2’s timeline for example. The timeline includes, album releases, information on when band members joined and left and even the timeline of events like concerts and tours.
4. Family - This is really a peculiar little feature. SoundUnwound lists your family members who also have a page on SoundUnwound.
5. “You might also like” - The link that helps people explore music. So from U2’s page you see artists like - Brian Eno, David Bowie and Bob Dylan. Now what someone might like is quite up to them, but SoundUnwound seems to do a decent job of finding related artists.
6. Edit a page - This is what allows anyone with an amazon account to go edit the page of any artist. Interestingly the reviews of the edits are done by folks at amazon - quite unlike wikipedia, where other people review page edits.

So should musicians take control of their pages on SoundUnwound? I think they should. Having a page on SoundUnwound will surely give a user that comes looking for a similar artist accidentally discover your music. Apart from that, the presentation of the page is really nice and telling your fans about your timelines, band members, releases and other details can only be good.

But how does a musician influence their page on SoundUnwound. Signup, start making edits and wait for the amazon’s team of reviewers to accept your changes. Slowly you’ll have a useful enough page. It does sound laborious, but in any case you will have to keep an eye on your SoundUnwound page, in case there are errors creeping in. So might as well be proactive and inform even more users about your band and band members.

But there is a problem. We can’t just seem to create a new page. So all you can do is edit an existing page. That seems a bit crap. But do search if a page about you or your band already exists. If it does, I’d suggest going in and editing all that you need to and can.

I am pretty sure SoundUnwound will catch up a bit, if not a lot. Why? They have this list of “Top Editors“, and knowing people on the internet, some will surely want to make to that list. So do expect a lot of editing on the site which will result in pages with useful information and thus people will start going there to explore music too.

Search for your page on SoundUnwound