[ Main Index ]
About the Music Database
Introduction
This is the largest index of Industrial/Gothic music information on the
World Wide Web. Much more than just a list of bands' home pages, this
site also includes a relational database of
artists, discographies, compilations, and labels. Some of its
features are:
-
An Alphabetical Index that allows any artist to be located
by name.
-
A Category Index that groups artists together by musical genre.
-
Discography listings of an artist's significant releases
and compilation appearances.
-
A description of each artist and brief reviews of the entries in
the discography.
-
Listings of other Internet Resources such as home pages,
audio files, and reviews.
-
Cross-referencing via links of artists to compilation releases
and links between related artists.
The overall format is loosely based on printed record guides like the
Trouser Press and Rolling Stone books. I've always thought
those guides were extremely useful for learning about new music.
Of course, books of this sort have two serious limitations: they are
out-of-date as soon as they are printed, and they are necessarily
limited in scope and size. A Web-based guide is more or less free from
those restrictions and can be even more flexible with its use of
hypertext.
There are now a lot of people publishing useful musical
information on the Web, including some very impressive artist home pages,
discographies, interviews, and such. The last thing I want to do is
to duplicate any of that effort, so the Internet Links are a very
important part of this database. For some artists, I may not even bother
to list a discography here if an existing home page already has one.
In fact, I think this database is a good complement to the
ever-growing collection of home pages out there. Home pages can go into
great depth with discographies, sleeve scans, audio clips, etc.
This database is more concerned with breadth and the
number of artists in the indices. This database also
attempts to provide
at least some information for all the artists that don't
have any sort of home page. I also think that the more concise
artist information here makes for better introductory browsing for
people who may be unfamiliar with some of the artists listed.
What kind of music is represented here
Obviously this database is a pretty direct reflection of my own
musical tastes, which includes a lot of industrial,
gothic, and atmospheric
stuff. I'm really not interested in turning it into
some sort of "All Music" site that includes every genre imaginable.
I'm more interested in coming up with fairly comprehensive lists of
artists that fall within those general categories.
Current Status
To be fair, much of what I've said above is more of a statement of
intent than a description of what exists today. While the
index listings are fairly extensive already, the narrative artist
descriptions and reviews are extremely lacking. Since most of my
initial effort was in building the structure of the system rather than
every aspect of the content, I haven't had time to do much
writing. This is one piece that I hope other people can help with.
Ultimately I'd like this thing to be a collaborative effort between
lots of different people.
For more information, see the
How You Can Help page.
Ed Klein
eklein@kzsu.stanford.edu