Welcoming all users!

 

You might say we like playing with the edge, and that’s exactly what we’re doing here: on this very last day of 2021, we thought it fitting to share a cool update with you — a cool update to us anyway. But, before that, let’s have a quick flashback just to be on the same page: on November 17th 2020, we launched the very first public version of our service, Sondz Alpha. From the get-go, you could access curated information on millions of artists, releases, songs and labels, all structured and presented for easy sorting and finding. In the months that followed, we added all sorts of new data (more facts, more video links, more connections in-between pages…) and we also improved the quality of our data (more up to date, less to no redundancies…) as well as its accessibility through our ever-improving search engine.

On November 17th 2021, we proudly launched Sondz Beta, which came with the first user-generated features the platform ever boasted: the ability to add your own ratings, reviews and trivia to any page of content on the website. Granted, we featured ratings across our website before, but these were gathered from (trustworthy) open source databases rather than our own. And there were no reviews or trivia to be found: if you wanted to contribute in a more comprehensive way to Sondz, your were out of luck. Until November 17th, that is.

In the month+ since the introduction of these new features, we have received quite a bit of user-generated content, most notably ratings, as we assumed — people love rating others, especially famous others, don’t they? Also, to be entirely pragmatic, giving a 1 to 5 rating is somewhat quicker that writing a full-on review, we very much understand that… Nevertheless, we also received our first reviews on top of thousands of open source reviews we’d collected on our end, so you should already get an interesting take on many classic popular releases.

Finally, we’re happy to report that the first bits of trivia have also been published on the platform: we’re not gonna lie, that part is our personal favorite — we love knowing little tidbits about the stars, such as the fact that the great Dionne Warwick was Whitney Houston’s maternal cousin, that Motown’s legendary bass player James Jamerson had to play the bass line to Marvin Gaye’s classic “What’s Going On” lying down as he was too drunk to stand, or that Queen’s A Night at the Opera opener “Death on Two Legs” was addressed to the band’s first manager… You know, fun facts.

Today, as a bit of a belated Christmas gift as well as an early nod to the upcoming year of 2022 — which we already know will be amazing — we are thrilled to introduce the next step in our user-facing features: a full user area. Now, once you sign in to Sondz, you will be able to access at all times all the ratings, reviews and trivia you wrote on any page of the site, and potentially edit (or erase) them if you so choose. All you have to do is click on your thumbnail, browse through the categories and find the rating, review and/or trivia of yours you want to check out. Just in case the 5 star rating you gave Britney Spears doesn’t sit well with bandmates from your new metal outfit, or because you just want to remember what you wrote about said Britney Spears. Or any other musician, of course.

To be clear, this is by no means the end of our ventures into user-generated content, the opposite in fact: we view this as the first major step in Sondz becoming a truly collaborative platform, which we intended all along. We are extremely happy that now, anyone (with a Facebook or Google account) is able to contribute to our platform — and track said contributions. We hope as many of you as possible will seize the opportunity to share content, as we are already deep in thought imagining all the ways we could improve your experience and add a host of other cool features… Well, cool to us anyway.

In the meantime, have an amazing new year with Sondz!