MusicMight

» see musicmight.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Garry Sharpe-Young was a British music writer living in Taranaki, on the west coast of New Zealand's North Island, and what he built there was the reference work metal did not otherwise have. Rockdetector.com was answering queries by late 2001. By March 2005 it listed 30,000 bands, by October 2006 it listed 50,000, and the December 2007 count was over 59,400 bands with more than 92,000 releases and close to 659,000 individual songs attached to them. Behind those numbers sat one writer and a handful of correspondents who filed entries to him.

The 2008 relaunch was the ambitious part. He spent more than a year rewriting the database and the front end, and on 1 September 2008 the thing came back as MusicMight.com with 60,000 artists and 144,000 individual people indexed against them. That second figure is the one that shows what he was actually attempting. Most music databases of the era listed bands. This one listed every member of every lineup and tracked them across bands, which is why Blabbermouth ran a story about half a million musicians being in there.

On 12 March 2010 Sharpe-Young suffered an aneurysm at home and died. He was 45. The site kept serving pages, because a database sitting on a server does not know its editor is gone, but nothing was ever added to it again. The archive shows the same homepage at almost exactly the same byte count through December 2016. By late November 2018 the domain was answering with a default IIS welcome screen, which is what a Windows server looks like after somebody deletes the site and leaves the box running.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the count was actually for ~

The reason to index 144,000 people rather than 60,000 bands is that metal lineups are unstable in a way that pop groups are not. Members leave, form side projects, get replaced, and come back a decade later. A band-level database cannot answer the question that fans of the genre actually ask, which is where a particular drummer went. Rockdetector could answer it, and that made it a working research tool rather than a directory.

Sharpe-Young turned the same material into print. The Rockdetector A-Z series gave death metal and thrash their own volumes, and Jawbone Press published his 2007 doorstop, Metal: The Definitive Guide. The books are still in libraries. They are the reason the research survived at all.

~ the single point of failure ~

Nobody designed MusicMight to depend on one life, but that is how it was built, and a site with a hundred contributors would have kept going. The archive has no takeover notice, no caretaker post, no handoff of the login. Nobody inherited the credentials or the will to keep filing entries, and the corrections queue simply stopped being read.

Metal Archives had launched in 2002 and was run by a volunteer moderation pool from the start, which is the whole difference in outcome. It absorbed the traffic without anyone announcing a transfer. The genre kept its encyclopedia and lost the better-written one.

~ distance ~

I was not in this database's audience. My metal listening was the ordinary Turkish version of it, cassettes first and then mp3s dragged down a 56k line, which needed no discography research to sustain. Rockdetector was a tool for the kind of listener who wants to trace a session bassist through four bands, and I was never that listener. What I recognize instead is the shape of the thing. One person with a database and enough years, publishing something an industry could not be bothered to compile, reachable from Ankara or Taranaki at the same cost. That model built a lot of the useful web between 1998 and 2008, and it broke the same way every time.

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