Anyone out there interested in
FOAF aside from me?
While thinking about FOAF in the context of social websites, it struck me that not only would this be a good way to define social structures, but could be a useful way to define artist relationships too. In the long tail scenario, and especially on the local scene, friends of a band (FOAB?) can be a very useful tool for both bands and fans. Most long tail bands (as in, the ones that aren't famous, but still make killer music) generally tend to play with, help promote and follow other similar bands to their own. It would follow that having a method to capture these relationships in a technical sense would, well, make sense.
In Rhapsody we have the notion of "Related Artists", specifically; "Followers", "Contemporaries", and "Influences". I find these to be and excellent resource for discovering new (at least to me) artists. However, this data is currently derived only from our internal editors, and while they rock, there are a lot more bands that rock too. Music has a very long tail.
A personal feature I would like to see in Rhapsody would be the ability to give users the option of helping us define these band relationships. Let bands and fans derive their own social context. Further, opening that context up to in a FOAF type of format would offer up the ability to make some very visual interesting music discovery systems.
What does everyone else think? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Josh Wright
Lead PGM, Rhapsody Web Services
