I think its brilliant what the Audio and Music team have achieved with the music artist beta pages. You can read posts byTom Scott and Matthew Shorter for more information.
I would like to echo the sentiments of Matthew by saying that this kind of service has a large amount of public value and is definitely something the BBC should be doing with licence fee money.
I am a big fan of crowd sourcing. Harnessing the potential audience that will visit these pages and coupling this with community-generated data will hopefully produce a really useful service. Pushing this data back into the community will hopefully encourage more people to add to the data in Wikipedia and Musicbrainz making the whole ecosystem stronger.
It is a great start with massive potential, so I encourage you to help out a little and linkup some of your favourite artists.
Here are the instructions below lifted from Matthew Shorter’s post.
- visit http://musicbrainz.org
- enter artist name in the “artist” field under “Search” on the left hand side
- click on the name you’re after on the list of results
- select the alphanumeric ID from the page’s URL, e.g. from http://musicbrainz.org/artist/4dca4bb2-23ba-4103-97e6-5810311db33a.html, select 4dca4bb2-23ba-4103-97e6-5810311db33a.
- paste the ID to the end of the URL http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/, e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/4dca4bb2-23ba-4103-97e6-5810311db33a
I only hope that we can do something similar on the TV side of things.
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One Comment
Jamie Tetlow
Jamie Tetlow
3 August, 2008
Hey Ben, TV will benefit too! This initial launch only includes tracks from Radio’s VCS digital playout but the admin tools are already in place to get the non-VCS specialist shows in there too (just a question of training) - TV/Vision are eager to get their hands on the very same tools to add tracklistings to their /programme pages for not only music programmes but also dramas (imagine Ashes to Ashes). All this data will flow into the same graph so just a question when not how :-)