Bumming round the net I often find specialist music sites - Zappateer.com, the Bach Society, http://gustavmahler.net.free.fr/us.html, - who focus on one area or subject, and have a tailored UX that matches the needs and wants of their users.
In as much as these sites have to deal with recorded music or music events then they take some approach to categorizing and storing meta-data about them.
Can, or could, MB make their lives and sites better and easier, while at the same time MB would benefit from the metadata they would add to MB?
I think MB could absolutely make “specialist” web sites far better by being used as a backend.
I believe that the best thing anyone who make a kind of music related site (a specialist website, a marketplace, etc.) should first get the MusicBrainz database and then make sure that they use MBIDs in their own local database for cross referencing. This enables them to let MB take care of things such as social media and other website links, band memberships, family relationships, lots of other types of relationships.
It would reduce overall duplication of data and would allow various “music communities” to improve on each other’s data sets indirectly (e.g., there will likely be some overlap between a “rock”, a “punk”, and a “metal” fan/specialist site/database, and having the communities work together via MusicBrainz means that all three of those hypothetical sites would improve).
And obviously, MusicBrainz itself would also benefit by having more people from more communities get more involved with MusicBrainz and add more data to MusicBrainz.
It would be nice if MusicBrainz offered some kind of module to integrate a subset of MusicBrainz data in websites like that. I come across quite a few websites with discographies for a specific artist or label, and a lot of those are made by not very technical people who just dump everything into plain text in an html website. If those people would enter the information in MusicBrainz and have an intuitive interface to bring that data into their own website, it would help both us and them.
Maybe that would be a nice contained project for GSoC next year.
