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Question about metadata on song pages

Hello guys,

I have a question regarding the song pages. I'm aware that you group the songs ("Performance" in your wording) by title, composers and artists.

So, when I update, say, a genre on one of your song pages, other song pages with the same song but small differences in the title or different composers are not updated. Of course, it's clear why this happens.

Now I'm wondering why genres, styles, moods, and themes are exactly the same for "different" songs although my updates are not applied to them.

Here is an example:
(1) https://www.allmusic.com/song/never-get-out-of-these-blues-alive-mt0015185670
(2) https://www.allmusic.com/song/ill-never-get-out-of-these-blues-alive-mt0000160425

Both are obvious the same song, but since the difference in the title and composers my change of the genre in (1) is not reflected in (2).

My question is: why are all genres (before my change), styles, moods, and themes exactly the same for both (including the counts) although my change is not applied to both? Do you update them regularly in a separate process?

I would be glad, if you could shed some light on it.

Thanks,
Christian

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3 replies

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I don't believe there was ever a formal process put in place to push the genres and styles down from the artist to all of the albums, but these albums may have been covered almost 30 years ago, so it is possible someone in the editorial team applied the artist's descriptors to their albums.

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C

Zac, do you have some more details on the "process of attributing data to songs and cascading it down to every instance" for us?
Which songs were attributed (an album version, a remix)?
And which instances were cascaded with these attributes (e.g. were attributes of album versions applied to other versions)?
I'm interested how reliable the metadata is.

Christian, unfortunately I don't.

At that time (wow, about 20 years ago) the editorial team was trying to cover as many songs as possible so it is likely that a techno remix of a pop song might not get techno-specific descriptors applied to it.

Feel free to take a look at some specific song pages to judge how accurate the descriptor attributes are.

C

Since 2017, I think, you do it differently and let your users apply metadata to songs, that's really cool btw, but don't you get this data from TiVo? If not, why have you stopped producing your own?

At some point TiVo chose to focus their energies away from assigning specific genres, styles, moods and themes to individual songs. We still see value in it so we wanted to ask our users to carry the torch and add their descriptors to newer songs that never received descriptors, or to continue embellishing popular older songs that were profiled by the editors.

Ideally we can use this combination of user- and editorial-submitted info to build cool exploration tools (like we have Advanced Search for albums).

C

Thanks a lot for your answers!

C

Many thanks to you Zac for your quick response and your fascinating insights! Would you mind if I ask you some follow-up questions?

When you write "a process to cascade the song descriptors down to every instance of the song", what do you mean by "every instance"? Do you mean the exact same version of a song or all possible versions of a song (like a remix or instrumental version)?

I have a second question regarding the grouping of the Performance entities (what we know as song pages). They are grouped by artists, composers and title. Since there are no song pages for different versions of a song, I expect that you remove version identifiers (like "(remix") or "(alternate version)") from a title before grouping them. Do you also use them to put together the Variations page or do you have better metadata for this from your data provider that allows the identification of a remixed version for example?

Btw, why are the version identifiers often missing in titles on album pages, when the info is actually there on the album cover? I mean albums like this: Madonna - Take a Bow.

Thanks for taking your time to answer my questions. Now I have the possibility to clarify some things that always bothered me when using AM.

Best regards,
Christian

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We use attributes associated with the data (like "live" or "remix" or "demo") to come up with the variations tab wherever we can. In some instances, the data may not be complete enough for us to split these version out so they may end up grouped into the overview tab.

https://www.allmusic.com/song/take-a-bow-mt0002659183/variations

In regards to why some songs may not contain the specific remix title even when they are on the packaging, I'm not sure. There are something like 35 million individual tracks in the database and during the past three decades many data cleaning/standardizing projects have taken place. It is possible that the single you mentioned had additional title information at one time but it has been standardized somewhere along the way (for better or for worse).

This is an awesome question and thanks for contributing to help improve the descriptions we have associated with our song data.

The initial set of descriptors (genres, styles, moods and themes) that you see on the performances were applied by the editors several years ago. At that point there was a process to cascade the song descriptors down to every instance of the song as best as could be determined at the time. This meant that a lot more songs got covered, but occasionally could lead to some performances getting blanketed with slightly incorrect descriptors.

When we built the user-submitted song descriptor interface, we chose to try to keep the descriptors people were assigning to the specific performance in front of them (and not push them over to other title variations of the songs) just because we felt as though that would be a cleaner way to make sure that the genres, styles, moods and themes that the user was applying went specifically to the performance they were interacting with.

We could potentially sweep back through and push more of these descriptors over to versions and variations that we think might be the same tune, but without clear metadata to link them exactly I worry that we might jumble some things in the process.

What would be ideal is if the record labels and artists would always accurately put the song titles on the album covers, but in the case you give above nearly every John Lee Hooker album titles the song "Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive" except when Columbia put out the Martin Scorsese compilation they decided to call it "I'll Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive" for whatever reason.

Hope this helps, and thanks again.

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Zac, did Allmusic apply the "process to cascade" an artist's genres and styles?  I notice that Dallas Frazier's genres and styles are same as those of his albums, even when not reviewed except his debut album and compilation.  If yes, is that process still being used for new releases and compilations?  Thanks.

C

@rootsmusic: Yes, there are a lot of artists where artist and album genres are the same, but
(1) many artists only have one album so it's no surprise that they match and
(2) if an artist has genre X, it's no surprise that genre X applies to their albums as well.

There are actually artists where genres, styles, moods and themes are the same for the artist and all albums. That's kind of strange, of course. Perhaps it was just convenient for the respective editor to copy this data?

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