While both the areas of music information sites and apps and twitter apps are full of heavy competition, MusicMetric of London’s so-called Silicon Roundabout has created an interesting service called @MuZoid to bridge the gap between music info and Twitter.

On their main page, MusicMetric claims to “distil raw data into knowledge about the music business” which sounds a bit like a cross between a brewery and a record label but has led to a site full of micro-features on a large number of individual artists and bands. Where things get interesting is how they have decided to disseminate these pages and decide which pages to add next. Smart script (and, according to creators, female gendered script) MuZoid is a Twitter application that allows any user to send an a message to @MuZoid with the name of an artist of interest. If MusicMetric already has a page for that artist, MuZoid replies instantly with the link, providing a list of albums, upcoming gigs and similar artists. If the artist hasn’t been profiled, MuZoid tracks down the information, creates the page and as soon as it’s complete, responds to the original comment.

In theory, this service is useful as it provides information about bands and related music suggestions much more rapidly than a web search on the topic and the system works exactly as advertised with surprising speed, catering well to a “need it now” mentality. It will be interesting, however, to see if there are more practical applications for this tool. The MusicMetric page provides genre, album and similar artist information – all features that are already available from most streaming music applications and websites which would be the places one would be most likely to find an artist to learn more about. The gig listings are much more useful (although, again, often already listed in the places where one might discover a new artist) but more often than not, no gigs are listed and there is no way to limit gigs by location.

One additional part of the MusicMetric pages which I would love to see translated into more features for MuZoid is the ‘Similar Gigs” section which searches for gigs by similar artists to the one queried. Additionally this bit does seem to be at least moderately related to location (I was only receiving listings from the UK and Ireland). I’m sure the very clever people at MusicMetric have many plans for MuZoid and it’ll be interesting to see how the combination of instant communication through Twitter and a giant database of music knowledge will combine to save me from feeling so out of the loop when my coworkers talk about new music.