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One of the challenges we face on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music Beta is to provide links to interesting and relevant content on the artist pages we are publishing - and keeping this information up to date.

On the current music site, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music Interactive team have manually entered links to news stories about a given artist. With the huge number of artists that we are now publishing on the Music Beta site (400,000 and counting), this would require an enormous effort to maintain these links. For example on Cliff Richard's profile there are two featured news stories about Sir Cliff - both dating from 2006. This stale data results in a poor user experience - if the featured news stories are two years old, the user might wonder if the site is actively being maintained.

On the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music Beta we are taking a different approach. Using a simple technique involving hyperlinks and MusicBrainz, we can automatically associate news items and artists.

On many of the news stories published on ´óÏó´«Ã½ News journalists add related internet links. If a story covers a music artist, it might link out to their home page, their MySpace site or even a Wikipedia article. In MusicBrainz, each artist can have several URLs associated to them. By simply cross-referencing each link on a news story with the URLs in MusicBrainz, when we find a match we can confidently say that the news story relates to the artist associated with that URL.

For example, this story on confirming has a link to at https://www.madonna.com/. When we look up the https://www.madonna.com/ in MusicBrainz we find it associated with the , allowing us to link to that news item from Madonna's artist profile. With this we can generate a news feed with RSS for any artist.

This simple technique is completely automatic and will perform across any of the 400,000 artists in MusicBrainz. As it is based on matching links added by ´óÏó´«Ã½ editors we can be very confident that a news item will be associated with the correct artist. We also believe that it adds value to the web, as ´óÏó´«Ã½ editors will be encouraged to add useful links from news stories so that these can be aggregated on artist profile pages. Editors from ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music will play a more active part in maintaining artist links in MusicBrainz instead of manually associating artists with news items, improving the data quality in MusicBrainz.

We would like to extend this technique on other music news sites besides the ´óÏó´«Ã½ but it requires that these sites link out to external sites, not just to their own pages. As discussed by Tim O'Reilly, there is a current trend for . Perhaps our approach to linking news stories with artists will encourage such sites to start linking out again.