Looking For Feedback On A New Online Classical Music Resource - Openclassical.

Hi all.  I would like you all to please give me feedback on a classical music project I launched last year.  It is called openclassical, and its mission is twofold - first to broaden access to classical music to the general public, and secondly to provide a useful resource to professionals in the long-term.

Caveats abound - it's still a fairly new project, and we just released a new build of the site in terms of front-end UI and functionality.  Part of this is the 'Top 10' landing page for each composer.

We have so far cataloged the complete works of Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninoff, and a few others.  Many others have their Top 10's populated, and we should have this coverage for the historically major composers in the next month or so.  One thing that's really cool, in my opinion, is our YouTube matching logic.  We take results from the YouTube api for each work listed, then perform a match / filter / sort algorithm to generate our own results.  So, for example, we have nearly 100 complete performances of Beethoven's 5th listed before the rest (of which there's a lot of course).

Looking forward, we have a several enhancements lined up.  High on our list are features aimed at music teachers and students, which should help us to get the site into the hands of young musicians, so they begin using the site to discover this great music.

I would like to ask the community here, being the new generation of composers, about ideas for tools that might be helpful to you.  For example, something I would like to do is provide a toolset to composers so they can manage their own page and compositions.  I would also like composers to potentially manage their own YouTube movies links, as for modern works there may be no movies on YouTube, or they may not be detected by our code (either due to limitations on our code, errors in tagging by the uploader, or the YouTube api itself not giving us the movie).

We are also open to any other ideas for the site, and changes which might be helpful for you to promote your music.  The most basic question to ask of course - would you actually use this site if we provided the tools for you to manage your compositions in this way?  If not, why not?  What could be added / changed that make it more appealing?  All comments much appreciated.

Thanks,

David

my first question is

what does this have that http://classical-music-online.net/ doesn't?

(apart from probably a better web designer)

.fseventsd - thanks for the compliment on the web design!  I took a look over at classical-music-online.net, and there are quite a few differences that strike me.

First of all, it would seem that the above site indexes a lot more works than openclassical - at this time.

However it does seem the vision is very different.

A key benefit we provide is a more approachable interface.  Like many classical music sites, classical-music-online.net does not seem like a place where a non-musician would go to learn about classical music.  It's a site that experts use to find more or less exactly what they're looking for, or browse new additions (with the insights to understand the contexts of these new additions).

openclassical strives to present a UI for both the classical professional and the non-musician.

A few quick cool things that openclassical does (that we believe is unique):

* sortable, filterable complete works.  For example Beethoven's complete works page.  Our concept of genre is at the composition level (and branches three levels deep), allowing true granularity when inspecting a composer's works.  We also provide dates for works when known.

* we provide an analysis graph.  Again, Beethoven's page.

* for each work, we perform an automated YouTube query, analyze, filter and order the results, providing a variety of relevant movies.  For example, Beethoven's 5th.

* we provide an interactive timeline.

The caveat is that openclassical is a new project, and in many ways we have just started.  We don't list complete works for many composers yet, but we will.  Our long term goals are to reach new audiences about classical music, by making it approachable, understandable and exciting.  All the features listed above will in time also work on a cross-composer / cross-time-period level, allowing you to browse (for example) Symphonies written between 1800 - 1820.  As a musician myself I find this a very exciting prospect.

Finally, it is our goal that openclassical will also provide living composers with tools to promote their music.  We want to promote living composers as much as the older masters.