coxy's blog

The BBC have launched the beta of their new BBC Music (beta) website that drags in data from a combination of different services - primarily MusicBrainz, Wikipedia, and their own music database - displaying it all in a nice, presentable format, which will undoubtedly become a great resource for both listeners and artists.

For those that want to dive straight in and explore the site, visiting BBC Music (beta) will just return a splash page that clicks through to a charts of 'Top artists played across BBC Radio' (ew, Coldplay), but there's actually a page for every artist in the MusicBrainz database. You can find your favourite artists by searching MusicBrainz and grabbing the MBID from the url...

musicbrainz.org/artist/83e72d2b-501e-4715-9bdf-8e6ffca42881.html

...then paste this into the BBC url below:

bbc.co.uk/music/artists/83e72d2b-501e-4715-9bdf-8e6ffca42881

Each page contains artist information; a biography and imagery from Wikipedia, a list of Album and Single releases, colaborations, weblinks and related artists from MusicBrainz, and radio play data from the BBC database; showing play counts for each BBC radio station and play counts for each DJ on said radio stations.

Matthew Shorter of the BBC offers a little more insight:

Currently our offerings around individual artists tend to be dispersed and hard to find. This leads to poor search performance for BBC music content, which means that users will typically only find content if directed by broadcast, or serendipitously by browsing brand sites.

Persistent unique URLs for artist pages which automatically aggregate what the BBC has to offer around individual artists will lead over time to much improved search performance and facilitate wider syndication of our content, building reach to brands. Automation and dynamic publishing means the pages can be created and maintained with a fraction of the manpower and server load of the current generation.

Building good interrelated metadata for artists and programmes will also help greatly to enrich the music offering of radio & TV sites, offering such things as a chart of artists most played by a network, further information behind tracklists, rich now-playing information and so on.

All the information that's currently displayed on the site is great to geek out on, however I can't help but one thing is missing; I would love to see social music revolution Last.fm incorporated.

Immediately I noticed that a few of my favourite artists were lacking a artist description or photography because they haven't got a Wikipedia page yet - or have had it deleted by moderators as the bands haven't yet made 'a significant contribution to music' yet (don't get me started on Wikipedia's moderation) - where Last.fm has a wealth of biography information and photography due to the nature of the site.

What's more, further incorporation with Last.fm would allow BBC Music visitors to find events in their area for each artist, watch music videos, view more accurate data for the 'related artists' feature and listen, using the most obvious feature, a music player. Though, I guess incorporating a music player deters from getting people to listen to BBC Radio.

The site is still in beta and is only semi-public, and so it would be nice to see Last.fm incorporated in future - and obviously a method of searching artists wouldn't go amiss (also, would a BBC radio data open API be viable?) - but as it stands, it's nice to see the BBC using a valuable, underrated service such as MusicBrainz and making it's own radio data open to the public.