Daz was essentially a wiki which allowed people to link artists, bands and media. Unfortunately we never got to the point where we got permission to stream media, but plenty of artists thought that was what we were doing (we just did the legal maximum sample that you could distribute under fair use). I can't count the number of angry 'cease-and-desist' letters that we received, invariably followed by sheepish apologies that they never actually downloaded anything from the site. But some artists really liked it and it was quite interesting to be 'pen pals' with some of the very well known names in the industry.

The whole reason I built it because I saw the writing on the wall with Gracenote, I contributed plenty to CDDB and suddenly saw my own work be used for profit.

Maybe instead of looking at a blog have a look at the archive.org snapshots of the website over time, they give a much better picture. I also built a media player / file sharing client that used daz.com for the meta data called mxchg.com.

But music on the web is very hard to make work as a long term thing, the bills have to be paid and even if the content is user generated you still need to supervise it and ensure that people don't pull tricks to vandalize it or destroy it.

I'm very much impressed with how Musicbrainz has been able to keep it clean, free and have such stamina, that's serious dedication.