Today someone suggested me an idea for a potential extension of existing CritiqueBrainz functionality…
One way we could make CritiqueBrainz more useful and interesting is by providing reviews for music, places, and other things is by aggregating reviews from other sources. This is a nice way to provide access to different perspectives from different authors, in addition to reviews that we have already. Even better when we don’t have any reviews of our own.
This is useful particularly in cases when we can’t “import” reviews (like we’ve done with BBC Music ones), because they are not distributed under an open (CC) license. But what we can do is provide a link (perhaps with additional info). So something like Google News, but for reviews (of music or something else).
Well, that sounds like what Metacritic does. Which would be cool, because Metacritic is very popular. Perhaps allow entering the author, a representative sentence or two from the review (should be fair use?), and the score they gave (tricky if their scoring system differs from ours or there is no score—that’s what Metacritic solves, but we probably don’t want to go there).
Another thing I should point out is that MusicBrainz already has a “review” URL relationship for events and release groups. I assume this feature would make use of that, since we don’t want to store the same thing in different ways across projects.