Why does your search results screen for "This Can't be Love", credit Diana Krall as composer (see attachment Krall basic.png), when the detail screen for the album "Stepping Out", on which the piece appears, credits the composers as Rogers & Hart (see attachment Krall detail.png)?
Basic stuff guys - pretty easy to get it right.
Zac,
Thanks for all the background info.
Scott
Zac,
Thanks for the quick reply.
I've been working on cataloging my CD collection, and using AllMusic.com as a source for credit info where the liner notes may only provide the composer's last name, or in a few cases may not show names at all.
I have seen a few other instances in AllMusic where different entries for a particular piece display different credit info. Where do you derive the credit info from? Do you depend on the music publisher, or record label, or do you have some other source?
Thanks again,
Scott
The metadata (track titles, composers, reviews, biographies, genres, styles, moods, themes, etc) are provided to us from a company called TiVo (formerly Rovi, formerly All Media Guide). They receive info from record labels, digital distributors, artists and management themselves, and from the physical liner notes of CDs themselves.
(more detail about the history is available here: https://tedium.co/2016/09/20/allmusic-database-historic-importance/ ).
It gets murky when a specific performance of a song by a musician appears across multiple releases of the same album, on different albums by the same artist, and on a half-dozen budget compilations and samplers. Each one may come from a different record label with varying levels of detail (and accuracy) in the liner notes or from the distributors' data feeds.
You and I both know the jazz standard "This Can't Be Love" which would be interpreted by dozens if not hundreds of people. https://www.allmusic.com/song/this-cant-be-love-mt0003908531/also-performed-by
But when the info from all of these different sources are being entered into a database, the liner notes may list Lorenz Hart/Richard Rodgers or Hart/Rodgers or L. Hart/R. Rodgers or typos in either name or no name at all or the wrong composers altogether.
When AllMusic gets the raw data of all of these individual instances of the tracks on the disparate releases, we do our best to collapse them down to a "Song" (the text of the song title + the composer or composers) and then display each different "Performance" (the "Song" performed by each specific artist).
There are a number of places where this process can stumble, mostly because of different/inconsistent/wrong metadata causing us to create different Song objects and/or derive different Performance objects off of those Songs.
We have 31.7 million Tracks in the database, boiling down to 19 million different Performances of 14.3 million Songs. Sometimes things around the edges get messy.
To your initial point, we have way more instances of Rodgers & Hart as the composer of that Song so they should be showing up in the Search Results.
It looks like though this performance exists on dozens of individual releases, almost all of them have Rodgers (basic stuff) & Hart as the composers. Only one that I have found incorrectly lists Diana Krall as the composer (clearly a mistake) and that is the one version that has bubbled up in our search results.
https://www.allmusic.com/album/release/stepping-out-mr0004539298
(a 2016 re-release of this album: https://www.allmusic.com/album/stepping-out-mw0000034514).
We'll ask for the one instance to be corrected at the release level and also work to improve which metadata gets displayed in the search results (clearly it should be the version that has the majority of the instances of composers matching).
Thanks again.
Thank you for the heads-up. We'll take a look.
