This week’s #FreeWebFriday honours WhoSampled.com, a community driven online project that is uncovering the connections between music through samples, covers and remixes. Visitors to the site can view any of 353,000 songs and 122,000 artists and uncover who each sampled and where their work has appeared.
The data itself comes from an army of community contributors, who are adding over 2,000 new pages to WhoSampled.com every week. The result is the largest database of its kind on the web, and it continues to grow as TV and Movie dialogue is added to the collection.
Who uses WhoSampled.com ?
The site was launched in 2008 by founder Nadav Poraz who wanted to build something enjoyable and interesting for friends and himself to use. Although the original site was quite basic, interest grew quickly and user submissions started to appear. Seven years on the site attracts 1.2 million passionate music fans each month who explore, discover and share music by digging into connections between artists they do know and those that they don’t.
Many users first discover WhoSampled.com looking to answer that nagging question “Who sampled…” a track they’ve just heard on the radio or in the club. Many then become regular visitors who use the site to explore new music, and of course to contribute. At time of writing, the top Contributor had contributed over 25,000 connections to the collective knowledge of WhoSampled.com .
How is the site funded?
Advertising forms a large part of the revenue mix, with banners appearing on most pages. WhoSampled is also available as an award winning paid app on iOS and as a free, ad-supported app on Android. They also license data which underpins music discovery experiences contained in apps, websites and infographics: recent clients have included Universal Music, Sony Music, The Grammys and SoundHound.
Many thanks to Chris Read, Head of Content at WhoSampled.com for taking the time to talk to me about their corner of the Free Web.
Mat has been supporting content creators on the web since 1996. As Co-founder of OKO Digital, Mat became the first person in the UK qualified to AdSense partner status and repeated this first with Google Certified Publishing Partner programme.
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