The Beardscratchers Compendium

Welcome to the Beardscratchers Compendium, an experiment in discovering music metadata.

It is an attempt to bring together all the amazing music information spread over the ever-expanding Web in a rather disconnected state. And to then present it in an informative, useful and —more importantly— fun experience! Let the Compendium do the hard-work of filtering out all the noise on the Web about your favourite artists, and give you all the best bits in one place. At this moment in time, the Compendium is a work in progress with a long list of features yet to implement.

Try diving in now, and let me know how you get on with it!

You can begin with investigating one of the artists selected as examples, or use the compendium search to try and find something you’re interested in finding more about!

or dive in with…

Recent Updates

2008-09-29

Completely beta, brand-new, on-shaky-ground, possibly not working events data for artists is live. Currently auto-detects your location (untested) and presents you with upcoming artist event data. Look out for the button/tab at the top of a Compendium artist page. More to come.

2008-08-13

Lots more work under the hood, with subtle changes here and there. This was a quality, not quantity, update!
- Comments for disambiguation between identical artist names is now shown on relevant artists. So now you should be able to know which Nirvana you’re looking at. The 90s Grunge Band of Kurt Cobain fame, the Psychedelic 60s group from the UK (incidentally The Story of Simon Simopath is a pretty good prog/psych album), or the lesser known Finnish punk band from the early 80s, and so on. Previously you needed to click the Alternative Matches link – which doesn’t take you to a dating service for indie scenesters, by the way.

2008-07-30

The Compendium has had some significant reworking under the hood, now employing the excellent Mootools v1.2 for interface goodness.
Most notable changes are:
- More video stuff! You should now see a ‘more videos »’ link, allowing you to page through the available videos for the artist. Nice. Oh, and a ‘« previous videos’ link too, which is always handy. Video descriptions, and who contributed the videos, are now available with a little showy animation to top it all off.
- Better data accuracy… well, this isn’t that notable, except that some bugs affecting how artist and release data is displayed have been fixed.
- Things look a little better for you Internet Explorer 6 users. Though this is for performance reasons only, since that browser is incredibly old and most people are thinking about stopping any support for it. Upgrade ASAP, as recommended by, well just about everyone!
Records in the Compendium have curiously levelled off at around 20,000 artists, and releases just under 30,000.

2008-04-19

The Compendium’s knowledgebase continues to expand, with over 15,000 unique artists recorded and 25,000 different releases…

2008-03-24

Who started a label? You can now discover who started labels, where and when. Such as Dr.Dre starting Aftermath Entertainment in 1996, Led Zeppelin and Swan Song and Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin) founding Rephlex in ’91. More label-related goodness to come!
Lots of fixes and fine-tuning— some noticeable, some probably not so… but they were all important.
The compendium is getting much more learned about who’s similar to who. It knows things about more than 2,000 artists right now —and a very eclectic selection it is— and this is increasing very rapidly.