Chris at the Long Tail wonders why we don’t have a definitive music industry equivalent of the IMDB or Wikipedia. Folks in the comments posit that the big data players (i.e., Gracenote) might have too much to lose.
We see this, in fragmented form, at CDBaby and MySpace, where artists who make money directly from fans are highly motivated to keep information current. There’s still some crazy chasm, though, between the eager independents and the household names. What about the folks in the curve right before the long tail? Those are the artists who often fall into limbo because of poor record deals or badly executed publicity plans. Those may be the folks who need some user-generated content the most…
[Thanks to Andrea for the bump.]