This post is from one of several previous incarnations of this site and probably doesn’t quite fit the current format. In a former life this was a group blog and a tumblelog before it became a static jekyll site. If anything looks broken or is worded oddly that could be why. Pardon the dust.
I came across the Covers Project while reading up on all this web services malarkey (since it has an XML-RPC interface). It’s much fun, basically a database cross-referencing which recording artists have covered each other, and charting the longest interconnected chain of covers in the process. What’s great about it is that it’s still fairly incomplete. I’d added a Nirvana cover of Devo’s Turn Around, and a Beastie Boys cover of Minor Threat’s Screaming At A Wall within my first couple of minutes.
Unfortunately the interface is slightly lacking in places. There’s no easy way to report an incorrect entry, and no verification of your additions as far as I can see (some poor soul has entered Madonna’s Material Girl as being a cover of a KMFDM song). It’d also be nice to have some kind of logging of who’s entered what, but it’s still good fun and I’d guess it’s only early days. Test your pub-quiz knowledge and see how many you can rack up.