MusicOntology

From W3C Wiki

Music Ontology

Internet changed the music industry. At first, sharing systems like Napster allowed people to share any song they had on their computer with millions other people. That new reality changed the music industry’s landscape for good, and many juridical battles followed. However, a biggest change followed a couple of years later. Communities like MySpace started to appear. Strong of millions of regular users, such communities helped garage bands and obscure musicians to create their musical niche: the longtail of the music industry. This second change is more profound than the first one: now any musician has the possibility to reach their audience by sharing their work on the Web. In the mean time, a free database called MusicBrainz archiving million of between artists, albums and tracks appeared; music suggesting services like Pandora started to appear and Apple started to sell individual tracks at 1$ with iTunes.

At that point, the music industry of the eighties leaded by blockbusters was completely changed.

The Music Ontology is an attempt to link all the information about musical Artists, Albums and Tracks together: from MusicBrainz to MySpace. The goal is to express all relations between musical information to help people finding anything about music and musicians. It is based around the use of machine readable information provided by any web site or web service on the Web.

Note: The music ontology is a project of Zitgist LLC.