The common knowledge sharing about music is slowed down by fundamental issues, often related with copyrights and the balance between creator and listener rights.
After beginning this project, I saw that the knowledge-sharing issue is similar in many other ecosystems, especially in creation. Some synthetic solutions begins to appear, allowing the sharing of knowledge and appreciation for books or wine for example).
Speaking about music, the diversity of actors, resulting creations, contexts is especially high, generating a complex ecosystem in which it can be hard to navigate.
Here "shared culture" does not mean that the musical track is shared, only the generic data and user feedback.
Several solutions already exist about the encyclopedic aspect of this universe, online databases for example (url needed). On the other side, some websites focuses on the appreciation point of view: how much we like each work of art, and some social interactions around them (e.g. SensCritique (fr)).
The musical culture is the fusion of these two aspects, the rigid part of names, values, and at the same time the human aspects of the inspiration (creation side) and appreciation (listening side).
I wanted to keep track of my musical exploration via a solution between these two aspects: I wanted the ability to navigate through the immensity of this musical universe, while annotating them in a personal way and keep track of the journey.
Furthermore, I wanted a granularity, a precision for the appreciation that most systems does not allow: I wanted to say specificly which part of a song (with a precision of one second) I prefer or find interesting. In all the solutions I saw, only Soundcloud allows something like that.
Since no existing solution was satisfying on every steps, I created this universe, for me and anyone wanting something similar.
This musical culture expansion is limited by several boundaries, some of them are considered as necessary for the survival of the creators and must be accepted, but some ohers may be erased without harm.
A big problem for the spreading of knowledge is the diversity of supports (even if this plurality is a gift to allow different diffusions systems). The diffusion network (online streaming platforms, especially) have their own commentary / interaction system, that is often closed and hard to control (not speaking about the user experience but the ability to access/get back/remove my generated data afterwards). By building a structured system above these structures, we become independent from the base medium.
A delicate issue is the debate about the copyright problems of remixes and the subtle limit between inspiration and plagiarism: the musical shared knowledge should consider indirect creations, but some of them may be considered by the initial author as a stealing of their work, so they wouldn't want to be connected with these secundary creations.
This section is more for the builders of this fundation than for the explorer, but the spirit can interest everyone.
Point zero, have a free access and opensource codebase for the website and the related player software.
First point, avoid centralization: it is too dangerous to have all data on one spot, for security and recovery reasons. Cf the Library of Alexandria.
Second point, related with the first, a strong codification is needed to allow intercommunication by shared standards. If we speak the same language, we don't depend on a single website or software to share about our common interest.
Third point, that I would call the drama of the lost playlist, every data a user entered in the database, every track he pinned for memory should be recoverable at any moment, to avoid the terrible loss of a wonderful track after a severe database problem.
And last, but most important point, be absolutely clean about the rights of the artist. To allow a sane ecosystem, its fundamental actors have to be protected and promoted: the creators should be able to see this website and spirit as an access tool to their creation rather than a threat for their work.