Is there something like the Internet Movie Database for music albums?

Factual Questions
1

…and if not, why not?

It seems like a no-brainer-- something that someone would surely have done by now. But my minutes of exhaustive research haven’t turned anything up. Briefly, is there a website that does for music what the IMDB does for movies?

Right now, you can use IMDb to find every movie that Kevin Bacon has ever been in. I want a site where you can type in, say, “Adrian Belew,” and find every album that Belew has ever played on, from Laurie Anderson to Frank Zappa.

It seems inconceivable to me that this hasn’t been done. I’m not trying to suggest that I’ve got one of those ideas that guarantees making a billion dollars on the Internet, I just want to know how many songwriting credits Myron Grombacher (Pat Benatar’s drummer-- as if you didn’t know!) has in his career. Is that so much to ask?

Granted, I could ask about Myron Grombacher here, but I want a central clearinghouse for this kind of information in general: What records were produced by Phil Spector? What bands has Charlotte Caffrey recorded with? Who was the engineer on Abbey Road, and on which seminal horror writer’s work did that artist base a concept album?

Anybody ever heard of anything like this?

2

Have you tried http://allmusic.com/ ?

3

All Music has no user-generated content it seems (message boards or reviews), tho
apparently you can (maybe) update certain kinds of info like Wikipedia…

4

www.wikibands.org was started a while back, but it looks abandoned in all honesty. I think they wanted to catalog bands, albums and anything else that has to do with music, but looks like it was too exhaustive for them.

5

Try www.limefile

6

I have often wondered the same thing. I used to use cdnow.com to get that information. You could find Myron Grombacher on a Benatar album, click on his name, and find everything that he was associated with – assuming it was for sale at cdnow. And that was the problem, it wasn’t quite the complete info, just whatever they happened to be selling. Amazon bought cdnow, but they don’t share all the linked data any more.

Another candidate is either of the CD databases: gracenote or freedb. These have much more complete info (pretty much everything an artist did – including bootlegs, etc.). However, the data is minimal and really only includes the main artist and not the performers.

Wikipedia is getting more fleshed out, although it isn’t dedicated to music like IMDB. The details are pretty sparse and the only album I found with Myron Grombacher was for Lita Ford. Perhaps the drawback to wikipedia is that it is very article-centric and not data-centric. Lot’s of people might be willing to punch in the data for a CD, but not necessarily create an article about the CD.

Then you’re left with either allmusic.com which Cuckoorex mentioned, but as John DiFool pointed out isn’t user-created content. Or one of the many music stores: iTunes, Yahoo!, etc. These tend not to have data beyond the main artist.

My guess is that most people just want the main details and there are a ton of sites that give that info. I suspect that the prevalence of these sites sap the basic need to create a complete wiki site, but I hope not. Maybe if one site could get enough traction, it would take off.

I have been toying with writing a program that trolls the internet a builds a database – perhaps as a starting point for people to edit upon. Unfortunately, my strength isn’t language-processing. Plus, I am not sure how to avoid running afoul of web site “Terms of Service”, etc.

There also used to be the Ultimate Band List (ubl.com), but that seems to be re-invented these days. I can’t remember if that was user-generated content or not.

chowder, what is the complete link for limefile? Or is it related to limewire?

7

The real test of any such music site will be whether they have an informative entry for Fate Norris.

8

I second Cuckoorex’s recommendation: Allmusic

(And they do have Fate Norris!)