Wind It Up

I’m sure that you’re all familiar with Wikipedia. Yes? You know the one – “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

Well, it’s a grand idea and everything. So-called “Wikis” are popping up everywhere on the internet and even on the intranet of companies.

In the same spirit, I’d like to reach out to all you musos out there for whom music is the single most important salve to your sanity. If you’re after information on a band you’re just getting into or want to check what year a certain album was first released then you should maybe check out SoundUnwound.

It describes itself as “the personal music encyclopedia” but it’s really just a giant wiki dedicated to music. It was started by fusing together Amazon’s music catalogue with a bunch of data from MusicBrainz, Mechanical Turk and other sources. Being a wiki, all the entries are editable (and, in this case, subject to editorial approval before acceptance) and if there’s a glaring omission you can create a whole new entry for it.

It’s possible to search by artist, album, genre or label. The site also comes with such goodies as quizzes (which are fairly basic, admittedly) and the opportunity to create your own “library” at the site, either by importing purchases from Amazon.com or by adding them by hand.

As you may have guessed, importing from Amazon means that this site is an Amazon owned project, which I guess they hope will have the same kind of success as IMDb. For that to happen, it’ll need to catch on with the public, which means you, boys and girls.

Click on over there. If you already have an Amazon account you can use it to log in (it doesn’t have to be at amazon.com – an account at any of the worldwide Amazon sites will do, so you can use an Amazon.co.uk username and password) or failing that you can set up an account on the site itself. Once you’ve had a look around, the “how to edit” page gives you all the help you’re going to need to get started sharing your musical knowledge with the rest of the internet.