The BBC unveils a service that tweets to artists when their music is played…

… and it is built using MusicBrainz data! Michael Smethurst, a good friend of MusicBrainz, hacked up this service in the space of 2 days and writes:

The original idea came from a friend whose music occasionally gets played on Radio 1, 1xtra and 6Music. Almost always he missed this and either found out later from a friend or never found out at all. But he does use various bits of social media (including Twitter) to make contact with fans and promote his releases and live appearances.
. . .
To power online music services such as BBC iPlayer Radio, Playlister and /music the BBC uses metadata provided by MusicBrainz, a community maintained music encyclopedia. If you use Twitter and you’re a music artist or an agent or a publicist or similar and would like now playing notifications you need to check that your Twitter account handle is in MusicBrainz.

Thanks for creating such an awesome service, Michael. I know MusicBrainz contributors love how the BBC uses their data — I wish more people made such creative use of our data!