Heh. I was on a team of Amazon engineers in Edinburgh back in 2007 who were tasked with building "another IMDB that we can sell ads on", and we ended up using a MusicBrainz dump to start up a music encyclopedia website. The idea was to take the raw data but organise it in a more user friendly way, add easy click-to-edit user participation and gamification, etc.
I remember seeing Robert Kaye wandering around the office when he visited us to talk licensing terms, although as the most junior employee I didn't get to talk to him myself. We also chatted to Col Needham, the founder of IMDB, and asked him "so, how do you become a massive media-encyclopedia site?"; his answer was "it's easy, just start 17 years ago."
Really we had no idea what we were doing, and although we got some surprisingly dedicated users (we sent T-shirts to a couple who'd contributed hundreds of thousands of edits!), the site folded after a few years.
I'm very glad to see that MusicBrainz outlived us and continued to thrive :)
I remember seeing Robert Kaye wandering around the office when he visited us to talk licensing terms, although as the most junior employee I didn't get to talk to him myself. We also chatted to Col Needham, the founder of IMDB, and asked him "so, how do you become a massive media-encyclopedia site?"; his answer was "it's easy, just start 17 years ago."
Really we had no idea what we were doing, and although we got some surprisingly dedicated users (we sent T-shirts to a couple who'd contributed hundreds of thousands of edits!), the site folded after a few years.
I'm very glad to see that MusicBrainz outlived us and continued to thrive :)
https://web.archive.org/web/20111005012125/http://www.soundu...