Inspired by a post on Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, Bigpicture once asked, “Why no IMDb for music?” IMDb is, of course, the Internet Movie Database, it’s a vast repository of everything to do with cinema, TV and performance. Looking for David Bradley the actor (actually there are two)? Then IMDb is the place to go. But, where do you go if you are hoping to answer similar queries in music? I think Bigpicture hits the nail on the head when pointing out that there are 100s of movies released every year, but tens of thousands of bits of music. Maybe IMDb4Music would be just too big for anyone to carry or cope with.

Nevertheless, the website suggests that a mashup of the following might take us some of the way towards this aural panacea:

Indy Custom Radio (colloborative filter radio)
Mercora Search (MP3 search)
Music Maps (genre studies)
Music Plasma (linking musical influences)
Amazon

The site suggests then using the recommendation algorithm of Indy Custom Radio with the reach of Mercora, the others are simply used for data feeds and to refine the recommendation engine.

There is an alternative approach to such a mashup suggested by Anderson in the original post:

Allmusic.com (great info, but no streaming, downloading or radio)
MusicBrainz (wiki-style, no music listening)
Last.FM (incorporates audiscrobbler; just radio)
upto11 (no music listening)
Discogs (no music listening)

For other music recommendation services check out Pandora, MusicStrands, and LivePlasma. If any of those are not available to you in your part of the world then check out HotspotShield and AlwaysVPN both of which provide US-based IP addresses via their virtual private network systems.

It does seem that a music version of IMDb is ripe for the picking. Those posts I cited are ancient in internet terms, but I don’t think anything has really changed since they were first published. Wikipedia doesn’t fulfill the role and neither do any of the individual music info and streaming services out there. Anyone know an ambitious and rockin’ VC?