MusicBrainz, the free music metadata service, has inked a its first commercial deal, with a social networking service in Spain. MusicBrainz provides an alternative to Gracenote’s CDDB (which collected titles and track-names for millions of CDs from the public and then locked it all away behind a paywall with restrictive licensing terms), that is free for use and administered by a charitable nonprofit (I sit on MusicBrainz’s Board of Directors).
To sustain itself, MusicBrainz offers a low-cost commercial, high-reliability service to companies that want to get access to its data in realtime (the same data-sets are made available after a slight delay).
The MusicBrainz platform is built on Free/Open Source Software, and there’s an active community of developers for it; the MetaBrainz charity takes donations from grateful users of the service — thus volunteer efforts are sustaining an important alternative in a market that is presently dominated by a single, bullying player.
Linkara is a social networking site similar to Friendster here in the US. However, Linkara goes far beyond what Friendster has done and offers its users to connect on their interests in books, movies, and now music. Users can search for music/books/movies, rate them and find other people who share similar tastes.
(Thanks, David!)