Way back in 2007-2009, a bunch of Amazon Scotland developers and I were tasked to make a ripoff of MusicBrainz, because Amazon wanted another IMDb to sell ads on. (The brief was literally "make us IMDb but in another vertical"!) It felt like a doomed project from the start, and I kinda hated the idea of ripping off an open project and trying to steal their users, but hey, it paid the bills.
We imported the MusicBrainz database, spent months hotly debating about the data model (releases versus editions, mostly), more months preparing the site for an influx of traffic (our goal for launch was 200 hits per second), and yet more months going from a team-internal design (Amazon at that time believed that engineers were perfectly good designers, which I think says a lot about the 2007 Amazon site design!) to an execrable bright-yellow-and-red "tequila sunrise" design by an internal Amazon designer from Seattle, to finally something attractive once we hired our own designer.
Then after two years of hard work we launched and hilariously sunk without trace, except for one dedicated user who we reckoned had a big paper music encyclopedia and who just kept on trucking, adding basic info, for months. We sent her a T-shirt.
SoundUnwound closed quietly a couple of years after launch. MusicBrainz is still here, and for that I'm very glad.
We imported the MusicBrainz database, spent months hotly debating about the data model (releases versus editions, mostly), more months preparing the site for an influx of traffic (our goal for launch was 200 hits per second), and yet more months going from a team-internal design (Amazon at that time believed that engineers were perfectly good designers, which I think says a lot about the 2007 Amazon site design!) to an execrable bright-yellow-and-red "tequila sunrise" design by an internal Amazon designer from Seattle, to finally something attractive once we hired our own designer.
Then after two years of hard work we launched and hilariously sunk without trace, except for one dedicated user who we reckoned had a big paper music encyclopedia and who just kept on trucking, adding basic info, for months. We sent her a T-shirt.
SoundUnwound closed quietly a couple of years after launch. MusicBrainz is still here, and for that I'm very glad.