Datasets and Data-driven Startups
measuringmeasures.com
measuringmeasures.com
In our case (http://timetric.com) - it was at least in part due to having spent several years beavering away trying to build products for the management of scientific data, before discovering that outside of science:
a) there's lots of other interesting data can benefit from better management
b) people will pay for it :-)
The article's a very good overview of lots of the issues we've faced in building a business around data.
For example, I think its much more risky to think "hmm, what datasets are out there and how can I build a business off of them?" than "hmm, what business do I want to create, and can I monetize through data acquisition?"
In the first case, you are going to be held to the availability of someone else's data. You don't know how it was collected, and you have no idea how it could have been doctored. In the second case, you create your business with a data-driven mindset, and you control all those parameters yourself. Then you are just at the mercy of how well your data reporting tools are working.
"We'll tell you the status of this customer's last forty-seven credit card payments" is a detail to your customers. An enormously non-trivial undertaking, but ultimately a detail.
"Hiya. We're Fair Isaac and we are going to purge the profession of underwriters from the face of the earth, saving you billions of dollars, decreasing your loan processing time from weeks to literally seconds, and allowing your consumer lending to scale in ways you cannot even imagine. By the way, some numbers are involved." is a wee bit more compelling.
But perhaps you run an advertising-based business and you're looking to increase your CPM. Well then, those details are suddenly quite valuable for advertisers if they can target a very specific audience.
Same idea as exploiting an underpopulated niche in an existing market rather than trying to create an entirely new market.
You can also bulk download Discogs here: http://www.discogs.com/data/
And MusicBrainz has one here: http://musicbrainz.org/
You can also bulk download wikipedia, cross reference page titles with a set of artist names, and grab whatever information you want if your Regex skills are magical.
A general word of caution: User-sourced music information is very very messy. Be prepared for a lot of mispellings, bad metadata, missing information, etc.
someone's already done this for you. see: dbpedia.org
That, and once there are results, carting them back into the 'production line' and plugging them where they'll do any good.
Logistics.