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There really isn't more to it than that. The contract clause stipulates that we will add links to SoundUnwound. There was some minor discussion about it, but nothing formal. I hadn't generally discussed this move since its fully in line with MB adding links to external resources and this is an easy way to accomplish this. > Or it's just MetaBrainz selling MusicBrainz' soul for money? That was uncalled for. I work very hard to make this project work and comments like that don't make my job any easier. > I hadn't generally discussed this move since its fully in line with MB adding links to external resources and this is an easy way to accomplish this. Excepted that the type of external resources we linked to are discussed on the style mailing list, and decided by the community. > That was uncalled for. I work very hard to make this project work and comments like that don't make my job any easier. I'm sorry if it that sounds harsh, but it always upset me when I see behind the scene decision like this one, that steers MB away from community made decision, in favor to external business interests. I still don't understand why you're not organizing a yearly campaign finance like Wikimedia is doing, rather than relying only on business customers. Maybe donations to MB are low, but they're not really advertised either... I hate begging for money and I wonder why Wikimedia keeps doing things they way they do. I'd rather be self sufficient, than rely on begging to keep the lights on. If you'd like to run a large fundraiser for MusicBrainz, please do so. There is nothing stopping you from doing this! I like how MusicBrainz does things (in contrast to Wikipedia or projects that don't care about money and then suddenly die)! @Robert: Can you be a little bit more specific about the desired implementation? While I see Aurélien's point, and it's always a valid concern, I think this is pretty small fry in the scheme of things. "Don't sweat the small stuff", and all that. If it's Rob making an executive and practical call on an individual contract, I think that's OK. If this is some sort of co-ordinated programme from the MetaBrainz BoD to "leverage existing assets" or equivalent corporate-like crud, then that would be more concerning. Seems unlikely to be the latter though. I'm interested in the fundraiser idea. Maybe it could be even more effective were it to be a community-coordinated thing, than a purely top-down Rob/MetaBrainz thing. Maybe we could even have better software support for a regular fundraiser - perhaps even something integrated into Picard that can help promote it (without being too intrusive). On a more practical note, it may confuse people a little that these links are there in External Links, but not represented as ARs we can edit. But they'll get used to it Just for reference (questions that got answered by submitted patch): @hrglgrmpf: 1. Yes, no links planned for release groups. Once this is live on test, I'll ping Amazon to make sure they are happy. Finally, I should also say that MB and SU/Amazon have in general agreed to improve their cooperation. Exchanging links is the first step – the next step is for them to feed data back to MB, which they are willing to do. However, we don't have any reasonable means to do so at this time. @voiceinsideyou: > If it's Rob making an executive and practical call on an individual contract, I think that's OK. That's pretty much what that was – an easy set of links to point to another valid music resource? Why would we not want to do this? > If this is some sort of co-ordinated programme from the MetaBrainz BoD to "leverage existing assets" or equivalent corporate-like crud, then that would be more concerning. Fortunately, our board does not play at this level. > I'm interested in the fundraiser idea. Maybe it could be even more effective were it to be a community-coordinated thing, than a purely top-down Rob/MetaBrainz thing. Maybe we could even have better software support for a regular fundraiser - perhaps even something integrated into Picard that can help promote it (without being too intrusive). If someone wants to run this, then please, by all means do. I've found that begging is vastly more time consuming and less fruitful than actually earning money. Besides, we just did a fundraiser for $15k and that was a fairly painstaking process (we just received the final payment that was owed to us TODAY!). And SRSLY, you don't want to see my mug on the top of each MB page, Jimbo Wales style, do you? @Robert: Hmm, I think the URL structure is perfect for their needs... like many websites (discogs, allmusic) they want the artist name as prominent part in their URL (and hide the ID a little bit by appending it at the end and using smaller numbers). The only "imperfect" thing is that you can't strip the artist name... so the URLs can't be normalized. These are all valid for Radiohead: http://www.soundunwound.com/music/radiohead/48 I wonder however how they plan to map their artists to MBIDs. I registered at their website, and it is not possible to link an artist to MB (not even if you create a new artist with the "mb:<ID>" scheme). Also I wonder if they really can keep up with all the moderations... @Robert Kaye > That's pretty much what that was - an easy set of links to point to another valid music resource? Why would we not want to do this? Because SoundUnwound is not really a valid music resource. It's a MB fork. That's my main issue with SoundUnwound: it's just forking MB, building its own community > I hate begging for money and I wonder why Wikimedia keeps doing things they way they do. I'd rather be self sufficient, than rely on begging to keep the lights on. I don't know why you hate begging for money. Furthermore it's not you, it's MetaBrainz. > And SRSLY, you don't want to see my mug on the top of each MB page, Jimbo Wales style, do you? Nobody has ever suggested that. Between doing nothing, and doing a full-featured à la Wikimedia fundraiser, there's a middle ground. > Furthermore it's not you, it's MetaBrainz. Have you checked to see who is active in MetaBrainz on a day to day basis? The board keeps a very hands off approach. Then, who else is there? > Whereas MB customers are dictating some of their wish. Give me a good example of this. And the SoundUnwound case is not a valid one since both SU and I agreed that cross linking is a good idea. Not a case of them dictating wishes. "Give me a good example of this. And the SoundUnwound case is not a valid one since both SU and I agreed that cross linking is a good idea." Dou you have information how/when SoundUnwound plans to put links back to MusicBrainz then? > Have you checked to see who is active in MetaBrainz on a day to day basis? The board keeps a very hands off approach. Then, who else is there? I mean that you can hide behind MetaBrainz, and rather that saying "Hey, I'm Robert Kaye, you should support MusicBrainz" you (or rather the banner) can say "MetaBrainz needs your help". > Give me a good example of this 1. Quick and dirty introduction of the release-group concept pre-NGS rather than in the NGS release, requested by BBC. http://chatlogs.musicbrainz.org/musicbrainz/2009/2009-04/2009-04-14.html#T19-58-25-290097 What I mean by "quick and dirty" is that the implementation was very minimal, with missing UX facility (e.g. selecting the release-group for a new release), and has generated a lot of extra work for editors. 2. last_updated/created columns on all tables, requested by MusixMatch. http://lists.musicbrainz.org/pipermail/musicbrainz-devel/2010-October/004090.html I'm not saying that these customers' wishes were wrong choices. > It worries me that as soon as a customer asks something it becomes top priority whereas more important issues (usually for users) might exist. So, this has happened a handful of times and each time is what was the community wanted. Do you have any idea how many times customers ask for stuff they DON'T get? What do you think? And given that we have 3 paid people working on this and you can find TWO cases we did something to please the customer and you're worried about this? I would say that less than 1% of our time is spent working on things for customers, but customers pay for more than half of the people working on things for the community. And you think this is a worrisome situation? Personally we should all be proud that customers are happy AND that we get spend most of the time working on our own shit. I'm happy about it; I'm sorry that I can't be perfect enough to ever make you happy. I think the controversy here is that the previous things that customers asked for were developed in an entirely customer-agnostic manner. Release groups are general, and they match a real world abstraction. And the timestamps have use to us as well, and they are correct data, which only talk about our own data. A link to SoundUnwound doesn't match these criteria though. We've said for a long time we won't advertise, but now we're accepting money off a company for them to put a link on our pages... I can certainly understand where Aurélien is coming from here. Edit: I've just seen that there's some sort of agreement to have data flow back to us which is awesome, but still very vague at the moment. It might have sit better if both parties held up their end at the same time with all the intricities ironed out at the same time > A link to SoundUnwound doesn't match these criteria though. We've said for a long time we won't advertise, but now we're accepting money off a company for them to put a link on our pages... I can certainly understand where Aurélien is coming from here. As far as I am concerned, this is a first step in a future collaboration. If you always assume that someone is going to do the wrong thing, then you'll never get anything done. Good business is a game of give and take. @hrglgrmpf: > Dou you have information how/when SoundUnwound plans to put links back to MusicBrainz then? They are already there and have been for months. See the website section in the lower right hand corner: http://www.soundunwound.com/music/portishead/47?pageType=contributor @Robert: Thanks! I thought of something more semantically useful, this is just a normal "Other site" link. I doubt we will receive anything useful from SoundUnwound besides money though. I can't think of a way. But money is not bad > As far as I am concerned, this is a first step in a future collaboration. If you always assume that someone is going to do the wrong thing, then you'll never get anything done. Good business is a game of give and take. Hear hear. This is low impact and seems a positive gesture of goodwill. It's trivial to remove them if the co-operation doesn't work out. FWIW, I was stoked when we got RGs, even if they weren't the perfect implementation. This might be low impact, but it's the first change to the website which only purpose is to provide money. If SoundUnwound is an useful resource, it would be much better to have direct mapping between the two ID systems, because then MB data users could look up things in SoundUnwound. Just adding links that might not be valid seems spammy. Btw, one more example of customer driven changes is the "lyrics support" which is planned for this year. That will have larger impact and will exclusively display lyrics from musiXmatch on the website. I don't think either of these two are good decisions. Really, this wasn't a "if you add links, we'll give you more money thing". I asked for full license on the contract and they said: Sure. And as an afterthought they asked: Can you please add links to SU from MB? Regarding the donation thing: how about dropping the rate limit for users that have donated a certain amount? This is not like begging, since you get something back in return! @hrglgrmpf: Once NGS bug fixing dies down, I would like to offer a premium web service for commercial use (read: give us $$$) and for users who have donated. This web service will have no rate limiting. Problem is getting to that point requires a non-trivial amount of engineering time. Since it hasn't made its way here from #bookbrainz-devel (unsurprisingly, I suppose), here's what I said on the topic the other day: 15:46< ianmcorvidae> I wonder what precisely the contract says So, to me, the current implementation at http://codereview.musicbrainz.org/r/1451/
If this gets shipped, where do we end up?
So, as my first line in the above transcript suggests I want to know: what does the contract and associated correspondence actually say? What is the leeway we have here to create a different sort of implementation that won't be so odious to murdos, luks, and myself (and anyone else who agrees with us but doesn't, y'know, poke around Jira in their spare time)? I think if we take this as a serious complaint but as one with a solution other than "don't put these links there" then we can avoid alienating any customers OR community members. And since it's sort of a side conversation, let me also support both the idea of fundraising drives and the idea for a non-rate-limited webservice for people who pay for it. The latter after NGS bugfixing dies down, of course How about if we
I think that could make everyone happy! Since the links are automatically generated, they don't need to be in the webservice! Every user of the webservice can easily generate such links for himself (using the name and MBID that he received). If later it turns out that SoundUnwound became a success and has lots of (own) content that we would like to link to, we can always discuss later to have a real AR for it! What do you think? I'd have no problem with "Search on SoundUnwound" links, but I was personally very surprised that even the "Search on Google" links we used to have were gone in NGS. I think these were way more useful as an additional resource. As a customer and contributor of Musicbrainz I have to say I really like the way Musicbrainz aims to be fully self sufficient by providing a useful service that companies are willing to pay a fair price for, rather than wholey replying on generous individuals contributing money, though I guess some discussion of this linking beforehand would have been useful. On another note, if Amazon are keen to have links between their sites and Musicbrainz and you have a relationship with them I wonder if you have asked if they would consider allowing the cover art links to be exposed (now that they often cannot be derived from the ASIN). Is there a reason SoundUnwound is paying for the live data feed other than good will? They don't seem to update the initial imported data at all, so they pay for nothing... I would be content with the separation hrglgrmpf proposes; if, as ocharles said, we have stated there wouldn't be advertising I think making the separation could cause these links to have an even greater appearance of being advertising. This doesn't bother me; I think that limited advertising is fine – I figured it merited pointing out, though. Tactically, we might reintroduce the "Search on Google" links, and perhaps some additional non-AR, non-webservice external links (especially to useful non-customer sites, if we can think of any), as part of the same server release, as a way of introducing this sort of link as a useful, general addition to the site. That way, even though the change was precipitated by a customer request, it introduces a customer-agnostic feature, in a similar fashion to the addition of release groups. @Ian: Uh, what a sneaky idea The links are totally harmless in my opinion, and nothing new: We also link to Jaikoz and Magic MP3 Tagger, because they are in the Tagger Affiliate Program. The links don't affect the data model, we can easily remove them if Amazon stops payments, and if they are clearly separated from user-editable links, create no confusion. I quite like the idea of separating it by a <br> and possibly having both "Search on SoundUnwound" and "Search on Google" (MBS-3150). Ian's bullet-filled post made some very good points about this that made me do a bit of a double-take. Bit of a concern about preserving screen real-estate though. It's not my intention to be sneaky; I'm trying to figure out a way that we can do this without it blatantly being advertising by my own definition (specifically: needing a side channel, rather than integrating in a standard way). This, "Search on Google", and potentially other things fall into a category whose addition is (at least debatably) useful beyond the stipulations of the contract – external (sometimes search) sites that may or may not have further information for a user of the site. My reason for suggesting we add some links other than SoundUnwound at the same time is that the addition of these things demonstrates the utility of this sort of link and takes advantage of it, establishing a new [standard] form of data integration for this type of data. If we do it with just SoundUnwound, the benefits of this type of link aren't clear – it looks like just advertising, and it looks like a special exception was made for SoundUnwound, rather than us making at least an attempt at linking in a standard way. Since SoundUnwound is in a certain sense a search medium, it doesn't fit into any of our existing systems (you don't make an AR to a google search!), and so we're making a new system. If it'll come across as sneaky, though, you're certainly right we shouldn't do it. That wasn't my intention, though Jaikoz and Magic MP3 Tagger are a different sort of thing; they're hidden in menus rather than presented straight up-front (i.e. you have to look for them – definitely not a banner ad!), and they provide definite utility to users of the site (those for whom Picard doesn't provide the desired features/support/whatever). SoundUnwound, Google, etc. don't provide definite utility (just potential utility), and we're presenting them front-and-center. We're also providing one link to the taggers, which is a local link to something transcluded from our own wiki, where we'd be providing (as of last statistics) 1,573,483 links to SoundUnwound (615,474 artists plus 958,009 releases), the other ends of which are all beyond our control. "it looks like just advertising, and it looks like a special exception was made for SoundUnwound, rather than us making at least an attempt at linking in a standard way." But this is a special exception for SoundUnwound, and I think basically it is advertising (we advertise to search on SoundUnwound). So nothing to hide
If they were in the same category as e.g. "Search on Google" or "Search on Last.fm", one could think they would be as useful as these are for research, but they are (currently) not. |
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New Feature
Closed
Normal
Add SoundUnwound links
Please provide more information about this contract clause.
Has this been discussed with community? Or it's just MetaBrainz selling MusicBrainz' soul for money?