Soundflavor has relaunched as a consumer-friendly database of song information that will provide users with a one-stop-shop for song information, videos, and recommendations.
The site sports a clean interface and offers a slew of search options that make it easy to find a particular song or artist. Users can browse and filter their searches by genre, decade, or even by the subject of the lyrics. After choosing a song, the user is presented with a mashup of related information, including artist bios from Wikipedia, recent news headlines, store links to purchase the song, and flickr photos. Some independent songs are available for free, while the rest can be purchased on iTunes or Amazon.
Each page also features a “One-Click Playlist” that generates a list of 25 songs based on a song’s “flavors” (which are basically pre-defined tags). The system seemed to work well – a quick test didn’t give me any songs that seemed obviously out of place. The site also allows users to compile playlists of music videos that can be embedded on social media sites or blogs (see below). One neat feature of these widgets is the “Any Requests?” button which lets users generate their own playlist while they’re browsing your site.
Unfortunately, there do seem to be a few hiccups. The site uses YouTube for its music videos, and some songs don’t appear to be correctly matched with their corresponding videos. For example, after entering AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long”, I was treated to a man playing the song… with his hands. Update:Soundflavor has pushed a database update and the song works properly now.
Over the last five years Soundflavor has compiled a comprehensive database of metadata on over one million songs, but up until this point the information was primarily used by other companies that license music. The company brought on Dave Pell, who was previously just an investor, as its VP of Product Design to make the site more accessible to the consumer audience. Pell is known for his past work on sites including Rollyo and Addictomatic. Soundflavor has raised a total of $5.8 million since it was founded in 2003.
There are a number of other players in the music space, including Last.fm, allmusic, and PluggedIn.
![Yes, This Is How I Want To Search TV Shows [Video]](http://cache0.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/sidebar_feature_1358_1257471084.jpg)
I wouldn’t call it the IMDB of music when Allmusic (or even Amazon) already occupies that space. Seems like a lamer version of Last.fm or iLike with its primary exposure to the web being portal/search rather than social features.
Uh, AllMusic?
This blog really makes me reconsider the Shakespeare/monkeys theory.
Smells like a plug… unless TC couldn’t find a startup more worth while to cover…
Apparently they’re better at selling information to other companies than providing a useful site for users. I’ll stick with last.fm, thanks.
AllMusic has had this market well covered for years.
These days, Wikipedia has also had impressive, growing coverage of most bands both popular and totally obscure.
allmusic.com has been doing supremely perfectly awesome job of this for years now. Some competition never hurt anybody but a post like this titled “XXX wants to be IMDB For Music” ought to have mentioned allmusic with a lot more prominence and respect.
I’m still not clear on the differences between all these sites. Last.fm, iMeem, SoundFlavor…search, discovery, recommendation…
I have to admit I like the UI of soundflavor and the fact that you can “Upload your playlists from iTunes and Soundflavor will automatically convert them into video playlists.” That’s neat.
I like it and it has a lot of indie music that I listen to. BUT they are missing albums and discography (hard not to compared to AM..). The UI almost makes up for it but that is such an important feature.
Maybe AM can take notes… their site is so poorly designed.
I think when they refer to imdb they mean in terms of the sound data about the songs, not the text data. They seem to be sucking in wikipedia for their bio type info, photos from flickr, etc.
Hmm. Feels like a commercial. UI looks slick. Don’t think it will beat Last.fm
Ryan
lessons in brevity: http://www.mofata.com
The Any Requests feature in the jukebox widget is cool. It actually creates instant video playlists right in there. It would be good to be able to enlarge the videos though.
Ok give an investor a job on the team? That either sounds like desperation or a disaster waiting to happen.
# Ayush
“allmusic.com has been doing supremely perfectly awesome job of this for years now. Some competition never hurt anybody but a post like this titled “XXX wants to be IMDB For Music” ought to have mentioned allmusic with a lot more prominence and respect.”
Techcrunch is incredibly bad at missing the real players in the space, I think the writers have a blind spot for companies they don’t use, regardless of how popular the site may be. Look at imeem, compete.com listed it as the most popular music site on the internet but the only time it gets a mention is when it’s the subject of the story.
Soundflavor is not imdb for music. Don’t get the Last.FM comparisons either. They’re more like Pandora for playlists. Difference is they expose their data, so you can browse by instrument, etc.
The jukebox is glitchy though. Needs bigger video option.
It doesn’t strike me as an IMDB of music in the least. It appears a lot of other comments agree with me as well. The sites focus is not on detailed information but more on just general broad info. I was really hoping for a site that was devoted the showing things like who produced what, who engineered, financing, and sales of albums. Anyone know any good IMDB for music sites?
Unlike others, I’m not that convinced AllMusic is the solution to all our music knowledge problems. The information provided is good enough, but the usability has never been great. If anything, it has become worse. It is pretty slow and you need to click quite a few times to get to the relevant bits you want.
The problem with Soundflavor might be that as a mashup site it is not necessarily offering interesting content that I am not already aware of. I looked up Front 242 but it did not offer any interviews or reviews. The bio was taken from Wikipedia, which I’ve already read. The collection of videos is a nice idea, but the quality was poor and the player kept giving me noise screens.
There is potential for new players here, but I am still left wanting something more.
pretty colours..not much happening. I grimace when things say ‘browse our (free) music.’. I know it’s going to be leftovers.
Not a bad concept but the space has already got a well known leader: last.fm.
Looks slick though.
Nice idea, but it needs more completeness. Maybe tie-in with something like discogs.com, which has an API already.
I too like the UI. If you look down by the footer they promote “Free Songs”. Well, to me I’d expect to be able to download these. Instead, you can merely play these in their proprietary music player. I can do this on many different sites. Give me something different.
“The Darkness” …. really?……………….really?
I saw some software like this which includes some cool features which are added onto this.
The software comes from Maroonbox.
I agree with PJ… for me, Discogs.com already *is* my IMDB… especially after I installed the Firefox search engine plugins.
jeez, i used to work at that place! it was fun!