Soundunwound.com is shutting down

Amazon's music wiki, Soundunwound, is shutting down. This is the email being sent out:

Dear [name]:
We are writing to let you know that as of June 18, 2012, SoundUnwound will be shutting down. SoundUnwound pages will redirect to their respective artist and product pages on the Amazon MP3 Store, where we are launching more personalized and engaging music discovery features. We continue to look for ways to add more detailed information and rich content to our core music experience.

Since launching SoundUnwound, we've learned a great deal about how customers discover music, and applied many of these lessons to other features on Amazon.com. We’re working hard to incorporate your feedback on SoundUnwound features you liked and things you want to see improved on Amazon.com. In case you would like to provide more feedback, you can email us at [email protected]. If you're interested in other sites where you can contribute content about music and artists, visit Last.fm , where a community of music fans share their knowledge with others; and MusicBrainz, an open source music encyclopedia.

We've enjoyed having you as a member of the SoundUnwound community, and applaud your commitment to sharing your knowledge of music with other music lovers. On behalf of the SoundUnwound team, thank you for being part of our community and for the passion you've shared with other SoundUnwound users.

Sincerely,
The SoundUnwound Team

 

If you are not familiar with Soundunwound.com, it is the wiki which powered the content of most artist pages on Amazon.com. Soundunwound was also superior to Wikipedia in that it allowed images of the albums and images of the artists, which are nearly impossible to add to Wikipedia due to Wikipedia's belief that promotional images are not allowed to be used freely. Amazon had no such fears, so it was often a great place to get an overview of an artist's catalogue, complete with pictures.

Less detailed than Discogs, but more informative than Wikipedia (and needless to say less antique than MusicBrainz), Soundunwound had a good balance of information and presentation for interested music fans.

The shutdown is no surprise, however. For the past year or two, contributions to Soundunwound have not been appearing in a timely manner. (Unlike some wikis, an editor would check submissions before they went live). The site appeared to be running with minimal staffing. Suffice to say, when I got the email from Soundunwound, I knew before opening it what it would say.

I enjoyed adding cover art to artists whose album covers were missing. Submitting the covers to Soundunwound was (at first) much faster than submitting them to Amazon, and unlike Amazon they became the official images for the database, rather than being labeled dismissively as "customer images" as they are on Amazon.

I also had some fun including artists who weren't strictly real. Drive Shaft (from LOST) and Violet Sedan Chair (FRINGE) were two of mine that made it past the Soundunwound editors. And in fact Drive Shaft was compared to Oasis, so I think an editor may have understood this was added with a wink.

 

Bummer. I didn't use SoundUnwound as a source. I did visit it occasionally and hoped that it would develop into something. Amazon certainly has the album data and customer interest data to have done something interesting.

Wikipedia is good for things like artist bios and basic facts and listings of the discography. But they're an encyclopedia and not a review site. You won't find album reviews there or band reviews or other opinion based writing about music there. That's why actual music review sites are needed. Now there will be one less contender.

 

Damn. All this time and I never knew that site existed.