Band nationalities

Following on from today's earlier post about Gaza, and the tacked on suggestion that Gazan could all form bands and sell music on iTunes rather than rely on international aid or persuading their neighbours to let them export goods, I got into a discussion on twitter about how to search iTunes.

It seems there's no way to search for music by country, and nationality isn't a ID3 tag on MP3s. So I'm going to have to build my own database of bands and their nationalities. I'm hoping to get a list of artists from last.fm, via scraping or benevolence.

Whilst I love building databases, I think for this one I need to get away from using OpenOffice Base, and venture into the world of online databases. MySQL is an obvious choice, but I want to start plugging in the data now, so I'm using google docs spreadsheet.

Check it out here to see how I'm getting on.

I'm starting with the most popular bands and working down, they seem to mostly be from the UK and the USA, but I'm sure I'll find those Gazan bands in no time.

Ooh, you can embed forms into websites and it populates the spreadsheet automatically, that's worth a try.