The problem as I see it is now you've transferred the ``power'' from the cocaine-swilling Los Angeles DJs to the money-hungry music retailers, and there's as much corruption in both places.

My idea is that the database genuinely suggest artists based on stylistic similarity, without any weighting imposed by retailers, record labels, DJ's, anything else like that. It just does an impartial search on an entire database, and returns the syle-matching results no matter how obscure.

Of course, the database itself would have to be impartial in order for that to work. You'd have to start with something like the allmusic.com database and refine from there.