DDEX is the set of metadata standards used across the music industry: https://ddex.net/
Also worth knowing that not all content on streaming services is music! Some of it is spoken word, ASMR, non-music field recordings, etc. The difference between sound and music is subjective of course though.
On an artistic note, music can of course be presented in an infinite amount of ways. Not all these can be represented (i.e., re-presented) on streaming platforms. Installations and generative music for example. That's ok! To be able to represent all this music (and non-music) requires restrictions, otherwise we wouldn't be able to create programs for it in the first place.
Sometimes restrictions on sound content are to make the streaming services friendlier to use, like the formatting of featured artists in titles. Royalty laws put restrictions on the handling of different roles, like songwriters and composers.
BUT nothing is stopping you from building your own way of representing music digitally, so long as you follow relevant laws.
I still think it's pretty bad for classical music. An important question for various pieces is who plays a particular instrument, but there really isn't a nice way to encode this in the metadata (encoding the relation of both person and role where role could be anything).
I also usually want to know who the conductor was and what was the orchestra
I'd expect publishers of classical music to know the difference between a composer, a conductor, a soloist, and an orchestra, but no, apparently not. They freely mash them up across fields. The difference between a symphony and an album is often mangled too, especially on releases containing multiple works. And for fuck's sake, no, a movement is not a song. I don't play, "like", flag, list, cross-fade, or reshuffle them independently.
Music metadata has been optimized to suit the marketing preferences of contemporary record labels. But more general classes of music won't shift units on Spotify so the message is loud and clear, a resounding "get fucked" from the assholes that run this industry.
(One side of my family is in the recording business. I can confirm the whole thing is run by assholes.)
This, many times over. Id3 tags are one thing but all decent classical record labels (most of whom have always been drm-free) like Hyperion or Naxos give you a pdf cd jewel case booklet. I've got recordings of many friends and it's always a pleasure to see their names in this. I don't use streaming services and one of the unexpected joys of iTunes is that the album art can contain a pdf with a cover image. The rest of the UI mostly assumes that you're listening to non-classical music though. I'd love to able to search for e.g. "Victoria's Requiem" and get albums with sensible names, even if they're in Latin, seemlessly grouped by performance.
A few years ago, we started working on a platform for classical music [1] and took great pride in our metadata and our underlying schema which basically covered 99% of all the weird edge cases classical music has.
Unfortunately, we couldn't make it work economically even though we tried several approaches for monetization and had to shutdown a while ago.
This is also important for jazz.
Should I wish, for example, to find albums where a particular bassist is playing then this would be rather difficult unless they happen to be the leader for that particular recording.
Also, it would be particularly helpful to have subgenres, e.g. jazz -> post bop, jazz -> free, etc.
Maybe you can explain one of my long-burning questions: why are non-English tracks handled so inconsistently? I'll sometimes see an English translation, sometimes a transliteration (for non-Latin scripts), and sometimes the original language. It's not consistent which gets used even for a single artist, and sometimes changes to a different one.
https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/en.lproj/static.h... indicates that there are separate fields for each of the original, the translation, and the transliteration, but it doesn't seem like anyone actually _uses_ these, and instead just picks one arbitrarily to stuff into the main/native field. I'm not sure if Spotify even has a way to display the alternates--I can't recall ever seeing a toggle for it, though idk if I've ever actually encountered a track that includes the variants, since you can't see raw metadata on Spotify.
Is it just that music labels do a lackluster job of handling metadata? I expect this is probably the case, since classical music is similarly messy--it's a crapshoot whether the composer or performer gets used as the artist. For that I've at least seen the composer metadata field populated sometimes, but internationalization fields don't seem to be used ever.
It's really hard finding Greek songs on Spotify for this reason. There are many ways to transliterate (eg "ευχή" can be "efhi", "euxi", and all the combinations thereof, and that's just with two ambiguous letters) and no names are in Greek, so it's basically a game of trying to guess the transliteration for the track you want.
This is an area that many parties handle differently. Streaming services, artists, labels, and distributors don't all handle translation metadata consistently. There are specs in DDEX for this, but it's a matter of support and doing the translation work AFAIK.
The song "Car Alarm" prominently features a car alarm on Youtube, but not on Spotify. This could just be a choice by the artists though, rather than a platform restriction.
Probably not a rule, but maybe more like a liability thing? If people listen to your music while driving, you don’t want them to freak out from the sound effects and then sue you because they got in a car accident.
I have noticed that it's fairly common for many songs to feature random car sounds in their YouTube mixes, but not in the final masters that end up on iTunes and streaming services. It is also relatively common to have "watermarks" (e.g. additional short vocal clips at the beginning and end) added to the YT/Soundcloud mix, presumably to make it easier to figure out if a DJ just ripped the song off YT.
Pleasant to see Apple has made some progress on their metadata guidelines (it used to be abhorrent for a company saved by the iPod). Looks like a useful one-pager to get a quick overview of the challenges without getting into any of them.
> Also worth knowing that not all content on streaming services is music! Some of it is spoken word, ASMR, non-music field recordings, etc. The difference between sound and music is subjective of course though.
Even some albums that are clearly about music can contain non-music, take Tenacious D's skits as an example.
There's a reason why MusicBrainz SQL schema looks like what it looks like, after years of careful simplification to achieve an optimum approximation of reality.
10+ years ago at Zvooq, during the golden age of music metadata and recsys startups, we tried to really solve entity resolution in the domain. I've never seen another streaming service make an honest attempt at this, even at Spotify with their 2014 acquihire of the Echo Nest. You still get Utada and Hikaru Utada as ~completely separate entities
I think MusicBrainz did a great job to find some common agreed denominator between all these styles and formats for music metadata. After setting up Funkwhale [1], I went through all my 16000 MP3s and synced those with the MusicBrainz Library, also adding new entries. It went pretty smooth and my library looks much better now. It is also really fun to listen again, when everything is structured and labeled.
(btw., yes, I bought a large percentage and, nowadays, mostly buy on bandcamp [2]).
What.cd had a very simple data model and it had the same issue as many music sites trying to fit it into a simple schema (and not a more sophisticated one like MB). The first issue that comes to mind was artist with the same name, these ended up being the same artist (Just like on Last.fm) if not split by hand by changing the artist name.
I understand "horrible" in this case in a somewhat lighthearted sense. But it points to a tendency to simplify cultural complexity in the interest of "legibility" from the system perspective. The same diversity of cases need to be accommodated in much design done for, say, a diverse country like India where though urban populace me be English savvy, rural populace aren't necessarily so ... And even in urban areas local language and culture dominates.
A place this diversity crops up most commonly is the so called "standard" firstname middlename lastname fields. This just doesn't work in India where people may have even 7 components to their names ... and who are you, dear system developer, to dictate what their name should be like.
The name structure diversity I understand is a problem for Europe too with hyphenated names. This brilliant sketch by Fry and Laurie says it all - https://youtu.be/1LopIroSjsU
I mean, we get to dictate it because we’re writing the code and don’t know? I guess enterprising Indian developers should help it get fixed. As the whole world gets online this stuff gets sorted out, eventually. It’s not as if it’s malice or something. There are Americans with longer names though, I had a friend whose full name was five words, and all of his sisters and brothers also had “three middle names”.
I've noticed some of these for years. When designing a music database, you do need to be aware of them. You need to use unique identifiers instead of names. last.fm doesn't do this.
There were four bands called Kaleidoscope, all active around the same time: one from England, one from Mexico, one from the USA, and one from Canada. To disambiguate them, generally the country is specified, e.g. Kaleidoscope (UK).
There were two bands called Bulldog Breed, both of which recorded albums called Made in England. They're decades apart, but as albums can be re-released, they're normally disambiguated by record label, e.g. Bulldog Breed: Made in England (Deram).
There are two Nirvanas, the original UK-based band, and the US one. The UK Nirvana recorded a cover of Lithium.
You'll be aware that the Beatles recorded an album called Revolver. A Russian band, called Revolver, recorded an album called Beatles.
Do you include the definite article in the band's name? If so, what about The The?
Tintern Abbey released a single single, the A-side of which was called Beeside.
> Do you include the definite article in the band's name? If so, what about The The?
My SiriusXM radio omits leading articles like “The”, so “The Beatles” is displayed as “Beatles”. I alway long wondered how it would display “The The”. Would it be “The”, empty string “”, “The The”, or something else entirely. I eventually learned the answer: “The The”. Which is good, but then made me frustrated that it wouldn’t allow the “The Beatles” to be “The Beatles”.
I've always thought it'd be a bit cheeky to start a band and name the first three albums "Self-Titled", "Eponymous"[0], and give the third album the name of the band.
Fortunately, I lack any amount of musical talent, so this will never happen.
In addition to all of these edge cases, it doesn’t help that the metadata services have a lot of inconsistency as well. Say I have a song X that was performed live on DATE at some VENUE. It may show up as titled “X”, “X [live]”, “X (Live DATE)”, “X (DATE VENUE)”, and so on. Stuff that should be in metadata ends up in strings embedded in song and album titles, which makes for a big mess. I curate a huge collection and trying to keep my metadata consistent is a massive headache. I think I’ve tried just about every tool out there and still haven’t found one that I’m happy with.
Or the many ways to have “featuring” — “feat.”, “w/“, “ft.”, “(feat.)”, “[feat.]”, etc. MusicBrainz does a laudable job trying to standardize all this crap and as someone who is really particular about how their music metadata looks it’s highly appreciated.
If you use a streaming service you're hearing the latter and might not ever realize the former existed. The re-record is a fine song, but the original fits much better with the rest of the album.
This is my problem with Rust in Peace. It was a terrific album, but Dave didn't want to continue paying royalties to people he no longer likes. So in 2004 or so almost the whole album was rerecorded with studio musicians. It is horrible, mechanical, flat. Even some of the vocals were redone, poorly.
I'll sign up for the streaming service that provides the original 1990 Rust in Peace.
This annoys me in Spotify so much, that we often only get one version of the album, and usually a new one instead of the original.
And maybe I should feel like it's a luxury to have extra bonus tracks with more takes at the end - but I lean over to the album purity side more - the album is one artwork by itself, I want the original track listing and nothing more, as "the album".
> If you use a streaming service you're hearing the latter and might not ever realize the former existed.
On a number of live Bob Dylan albums, for inexplicable reasons all online versions (not just streaming, but the download releaes, too) are now missing the between-tracks content that on the physical CDs is part of the pregap, which means you're missing out on the funny stage banter on the 1964 Halloween concert, or the infamous heckling on the electric half of the 1966 Manchester concert.
There is a band from Pasadena, California called Ozma. Way back in the day (1999), they released an album called “Songs of Audible Trucks and Cars” [0] via MP3.com. I later found out that they really wanted the title to be “Songs of Inaudible Trucks and Cars” [1], but MP3.com had a character limit on album titles, so they had to shorten it
If, like me, you immediately thought "why not just drop the 'and' and replace it with an ampersand?", Ozma had to do that, too, and parent's quoted the album title incorrectly, alas.
Readit News
The Apple Music style guide is a great and accessible place to look if you're interested in music metadata: https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/en.lproj/static.h...
DDEX is the set of metadata standards used across the music industry: https://ddex.net/
Also worth knowing that not all content on streaming services is music! Some of it is spoken word, ASMR, non-music field recordings, etc. The difference between sound and music is subjective of course though.
On an artistic note, music can of course be presented in an infinite amount of ways. Not all these can be represented (i.e., re-presented) on streaming platforms. Installations and generative music for example. That's ok! To be able to represent all this music (and non-music) requires restrictions, otherwise we wouldn't be able to create programs for it in the first place.
Sometimes restrictions on sound content are to make the streaming services friendlier to use, like the formatting of featured artists in titles. Royalty laws put restrictions on the handling of different roles, like songwriters and composers.
BUT nothing is stopping you from building your own way of representing music digitally, so long as you follow relevant laws.
I also usually want to know who the conductor was and what was the orchestra
Music metadata has been optimized to suit the marketing preferences of contemporary record labels. But more general classes of music won't shift units on Spotify so the message is loud and clear, a resounding "get fucked" from the assholes that run this industry.
(One side of my family is in the recording business. I can confirm the whole thing is run by assholes.)
Unfortunately, we couldn't make it work economically even though we tried several approaches for monetization and had to shutdown a while ago.
[1] https://grammofy.com/
The albums Ангедония (https://open.spotify.com/album/1HxmgR8wpc1ySplYCTNwaW or https://i.imgur.com/ndOXsgL.png) and Продано! (https://open.spotify.com/album/5kp7j9B4TDA3VfhaXz9XcJ or https://i.imgur.com/QJNjXc1.png), for example, both contain a version of the track "Рижская". The former uses the original Russian while the latter uses Rigas', which is a sort-of translation (it's an adjectival version of "Riga", which doesn't really exist in English).
https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/en.lproj/static.h... indicates that there are separate fields for each of the original, the translation, and the transliteration, but it doesn't seem like anyone actually _uses_ these, and instead just picks one arbitrarily to stuff into the main/native field. I'm not sure if Spotify even has a way to display the alternates--I can't recall ever seeing a toggle for it, though idk if I've ever actually encountered a track that includes the variants, since you can't see raw metadata on Spotify.
Is it just that music labels do a lackluster job of handling metadata? I expect this is probably the case, since classical music is similarly messy--it's a crapshoot whether the composer or performer gets used as the artist. For that I've at least seen the composer metadata field populated sometimes, but internationalization fields don't seem to be used ever.
Is there some sort of rule against sirens?
The song "Car Alarm" prominently features a car alarm on Youtube, but not on Spotify. This could just be a choice by the artists though, rather than a platform restriction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV7nHX2RLjQ
https://open.spotify.com/album/2u4HDb57v96iiJZUC7PqOx?highli...
Here's the regular version, same as Spotify, also on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4inWiKCt-E
I don't know if Spotify has music videos, but Apple Music for example does, so you can have both versions.
For a proper attempt to preserve metadata, I'd refer to the MusicBrainz Style Guideline — https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style
Even some albums that are clearly about music can contain non-music, take Tenacious D's skits as an example.
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Database/Schema
10+ years ago at Zvooq, during the golden age of music metadata and recsys startups, we tried to really solve entity resolution in the domain. I've never seen another streaming service make an honest attempt at this, even at Spotify with their 2014 acquihire of the Echo Nest. You still get Utada and Hikaru Utada as ~completely separate entities
(btw., yes, I bought a large percentage and, nowadays, mostly buy on bandcamp [2]).
[1]: https://funkwhale.audio/ [2]: https://bandcamp.com/
I'm still technically an automod although I haven't participated for a long time.
The schema is here in case you are curious: https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/gazelle.sql
A place this diversity crops up most commonly is the so called "standard" firstname middlename lastname fields. This just doesn't work in India where people may have even 7 components to their names ... and who are you, dear system developer, to dictate what their name should be like.
The name structure diversity I understand is a problem for Europe too with hyphenated names. This brilliant sketch by Fry and Laurie says it all - https://youtu.be/1LopIroSjsU
There were four bands called Kaleidoscope, all active around the same time: one from England, one from Mexico, one from the USA, and one from Canada. To disambiguate them, generally the country is specified, e.g. Kaleidoscope (UK).
There were two bands called Bulldog Breed, both of which recorded albums called Made in England. They're decades apart, but as albums can be re-released, they're normally disambiguated by record label, e.g. Bulldog Breed: Made in England (Deram).
There are two Nirvanas, the original UK-based band, and the US one. The UK Nirvana recorded a cover of Lithium.
You'll be aware that the Beatles recorded an album called Revolver. A Russian band, called Revolver, recorded an album called Beatles.
Do you include the definite article in the band's name? If so, what about The The?
Tintern Abbey released a single single, the A-side of which was called Beeside.
My SiriusXM radio omits leading articles like “The”, so “The Beatles” is displayed as “Beatles”. I alway long wondered how it would display “The The”. Would it be “The”, empty string “”, “The The”, or something else entirely. I eventually learned the answer: “The The”. Which is good, but then made me frustrated that it wouldn’t allow the “The Beatles” to be “The Beatles”.
Fortunately, I lack any amount of musical talent, so this will never happen.
[0] I know, REM beat me to it.
Example album: https://drumkoon.bandcamp.com/album/they-tried-to-ban-this
He has hits like "Hey Gugle Play Music" and "Hey Siri Play Space Music".
And some times they're altered without any obviously-visible indication like differing number of tracks or "edition" naming, e.g.:
- MM..FOOD? (2004) [RSE0051-2] where "Kookies" samples Sesame Street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RYCLfGE-_Q
- MM..FOOD? (2007) [RSE0084-2] where "Kookies" is totally re-recorded with a different and non-infringing beat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYSwvdEfeY
If you use a streaming service you're hearing the latter and might not ever realize the former existed. The re-record is a fine song, but the original fits much better with the rest of the album.
I'll sign up for the streaming service that provides the original 1990 Rust in Peace.
And maybe I should feel like it's a luxury to have extra bonus tracks with more takes at the end - but I lean over to the album purity side more - the album is one artwork by itself, I want the original track listing and nothing more, as "the album".
On a number of live Bob Dylan albums, for inexplicable reasons all online versions (not just streaming, but the download releaes, too) are now missing the between-tracks content that on the physical CDs is part of the pregap, which means you're missing out on the funny stage banter on the 1964 Halloween concert, or the infamous heckling on the electric half of the 1966 Manchester concert.
[0] https://www.discogs.com/release/8369169-Ozma-Songs-Of-Audibl...
[1] https://www.discogs.com/release/15809071-Ozma-Songs-Of-Inaud...