What's growing more quickly: the virtual aisles of Amazon.com
Amazon's latest dot-com creation is SoundUnwound.com, a wiki-based music website that lets its users piece together profiles of musical artists. It's not as freely editable as pioneer Wikipedia's music entries; community member edits and submissions are vetted by the site's editorial staff. That's not entirely a bad thing, since even the out-of-control rock and roll world needs rules. Content gets tweaked somewhat anonymously, though the site does rank its most active contributors.
What's in it for Amazon? Money, of course. Artist discographies have links to purchase Amazon MP3 downloads and CDs. Amazon's own website is loaded with music reviews, but this site gives the company one more way to reach out to music lovers.
If Sound Unwound is new music to your ears, join the club. Amazon launched the site on Monday, following the company's purchase of Shelfari, a social networking site for book buffs, last week.
Amazon's approach is sound. While larger retailers like Apple
Sound Unwound still has plenty of room for improvement. It could take a page out of Google's
All in good time, though. Give the site a chance to grow. For now, Sound Unwound is still at the garage-band stage.
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