soundunwound: good for artist information, that’s about it.

soundunwound is a new Amazon.com music site that has been curated with information from Amazon’s own music database, imdb, and musicbrainz.  This is a great site to find all the information you need on a certain musical artist.  Soundwound is artist-focused, not enough emphasis is placed on genres.

Genres appear on each artist’s page to describe them.  This site breaks down the genres in three levels (mainly, quite, hints of), as you will see in the following screenshot for Calexico.

clicking on a genre takes you to a description and top artists on that genre.  These are a few criticisms that I have come up with after playing around for a while:

• there is not one page where we can take a look at all the genres together in an organized fashion.  It seems that the only way to get to a genre page is to search for an artist, then click on a genre describing that genre.
• many of the genres seem to have no descriptions.  Really ? how much would it have cost Amazon to pay somebody to simply copy-n-paste from wikipedia ? It seems that the information for the populated genres has been retrieved from wikipedia – so why not complete them all, or most of ‘em ?

For finding artist information this site has potential – maybe even calling it the imdb for music.  However as a site for finding information about genres and discovering music based on genres it lacks some points.