The Jazz.com Blog
February 14, 2008 · 0 comments
Searching for Cool New Music
Jazz.com published it’s 1,600th review earlier today, With 400 reviews added to the site since the year started, seven weeks ago, jazz.com is covering more music than any other jazz media outlet -- on the web or in print. Jazz.com’s reviews are divided fairly evenly between current releases and historical material, and always come with links for easy (and legal) downloading, as well as a place for readers' comments.
This week, jazz.com also launched an enhanced site search engine to make it easier to find reviews and browse for interesting music.
(1) Site searches now come back with the highest ranking tracks at the top. So if you search for “Billie Holiday,” for example, you will get back links to the 30 Lady Day tracks reviewed on the jazz.com site; but the 8 tracks that received 100 point rankings (the highest score available on jazz.com’s proprietary rating scale) will show up at the top of the page.
(2) Jazz.com has also added a special search in the sidebar to the Music page, which allows searches through the track database by song title, CD name or musician. This is a useful complement to jazz.com’s policy of reviewing just tracks, and not entire CDs. A fan can now search a CD name and find all of the track reviewed from that disk.
Try it out, and see what jazz.com’s critics have to say about Mingus Ah Um, Kind of Blue or Charlie Parker’s Complete Dial & Savoy Sessions, or other classic albums.
(3) The site’s advanced search option also allows for specialized searches into the Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians, or the jazz.com community directory, forums, Visual Jazz galleries and other sections of the site.
The goal is to create a fun environment for learning about new and interesting music. I imagine that many of the jazz.com site visitors are like me – relying on personal recommendations from trusted friends when looking for new artists to check out. Of course, with all the new technology at our fingertips, the web has become the ideal place to do this, especially if you can create an interface that makes it easy for fans to explore and make comments, and marry that to a large database of reviews by top notch critics. These new enhancements to the site bring us one step closer to that ideal.
This blog entry posted by Ted Gioia
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