sort by genre

[RFNAPLES]

Thanks for your efforts and the ETA.
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums by RFNAPLES
Bubbling Under The Top 100 Greatest Mus...y RFNAPLES

[albummaster]

We just thought we'd update people on a bit of progress. Well, this is proving to be a very challenging upgrade!

Over the past few months, we've been attempting to seed the genre data from a number of different third-party sources e.g. Last.fm album tags. Amazon browse nodes, Musicbrainz tags etc but this is proving problematic for a number of reasons; mainly because there is little uniformity between websites and the data is not always available for the less popular albums.

Originally, we thought that having broad top-level genres would be the way to go, but once you start getting into the detail you start to realise the vast number of albums that simply don't fit neatly into this system.

We're now in talks with a third-party provider to license the data and we'll see if this is a viable option. If this is not commercially viable, I think we'll implement our own tagging system.

[mszahrat]

In Best Ever Albums I see the potential of Rotten Tomatoes. Its such a wonderful project. Could be the standard site for information about music, and could also be a good business for the owners . Brilliant project, but just have to add up the genre thing. What's the progress? I felt gracenote was fine, felt quite like the generalizations of genres that are there for movies in Rotten Tomatoes. Categorizing in genres is important, find an effective one, but find it quickly aswell, Best Ever Albums fans are waiting. As soon as you get it out I'll update about it Wikipedia. Cheers.

[albummaster]

Charts by genre are certainly on the cards and will make a great addition to the site, but not in the way that we originally planned. I think we naively thought at the beginning that it would be possible to create some kind of catch-all taxonomy that all albums could be classified neatly inside.

The truth is, trying to make a one size fits all classification that would work for the different kinds of people that use this site would be too limiting and not expressive enough. So. we've come to the conclusion that the best way of implementing this feature will be to provide a tagging system that will allow visitors to assign their own attributes to each album. Charts can then be generate based on these tags.

Tags would not just be restricted to genres, but could also include things like 'mood' and anything else that seems relevant for a given album. I think it would create much more flexibility than purely having genres and also has a side-benefit in that the amount of moderation needed to maintain this would be greatly reduced.

Instead of arguing whether an album is post-punk or not, a tag 'weight' will be used to decide the relevant attributes for any given album e.g. if Britney Spears was tagged 'pop' by 50 people. but 'death metal' by one person, then the weighting system would assign it as 'pop'. We could even allow users to filter tags by certain users so what they'd see would be the tags from their own circle of trusted friends.

Anyway, this is the direction we are moving in with this feature and it is still firmly in our plans.

[Bork]

Sounds like a good idea. I have my 4,000 something albums divided into some 20 broad genres, but I had to pull my hair out and bend over backwards to get it that way, and I still find that there are lots of albums I just had to slap in somewhere to make them go away from the not yet categorized list. After having gone through the hassle of doing that the next problem occurs. Putting albums into broad genres like that don't really help much, you always end up with a HUGE pop/rock (or similar) genre. And if you try to split THAT one up you are really in for a difficult project (and that is when doing it yourself, in a place like this there will also be a hundred different opinions). So, in conclusion, just voicing my support for the direction you seem to be taking this in.

[RFNAPLES]

Personally I use large categories for my collection: Rock, Country, Jazz & Blues, Classical, Holiday, Other (Comedy, Folk, Gospel, Musical, Soundtrack, Pop, etc.) I find this allows me to go to one section of my collection and then I browse alphabetically to find what I want. While it may help to attempt to let the majority decided a genre/tag for an album I think it will still be confusing for those in the minority. Keep it simple. I believe RateYourMusic already uses the system you propose.
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums by RFNAPLES
Bubbling Under The Top 100 Greatest Mus...y RFNAPLES

[albummaster]

The reason this project has stalled somewhat is that we started seeding the data and very quickly reached over 500 genres and then we started realising the list of possible genres could be endless. Add to that, the amount of people that would complain that their favourite album isn't classified 'correctly' because they have a different interpretation of what constitutes 'punk' (for example), I think we can do without all that here and concentrate on providing the platform for people to use. What we've done so far is provide the 'facts' for each album such as the year of release, the artwork, the tracklisting etc. Genres are not entirely factual, they rely on a human interpretation which can vary between individuals based on their musical knowledge and taste etc.

Once you get into the minutiae of specialist musical niches, different flavours of the same sound etc. Some people will think posting something as 'flamenco' is sufficient, others will want to see it labelled as 'seviallanas', 'bulerias' etc and let's not even talk about the regional variations and fusion styles. Tagging fulfils this broader requirement and makes the system far more flexible and future-proof. If it is user-driven, it also means the site is more scalable (in terms of the amount of data-maintenance needed) and it's more personal to each user because they can tag things using their own context and vocabulary. In addition to this, users can feed off of other people's tags so that they don't have to rely on their own musical knowledge to generate a chart of the best 'gangsta rap' albums (if they are new to the genre and want to explore some new music).

Yes, RYM have gone to the effort of doing this and it works very well on their site. At the other end, look at Discogs genres - they only use a small amount! I think Discogs quickly realised the pitfalls, as alluded to by bork. It is impossible to classify some music, so there's no point trying to force something into a genre if it doesn't belong there.

Personally, I prefer Last.fm's implementation using 'tags'. You might get a lot of 'noise' amongst the tags, but if you look at the most popular tags for each artist/album/track, the collective intelligence of the site visotrs gets it about right. In addition, the depth of metadata is far richer than you'd get just from assigning a genre. You don't just end up with charts by genre, you also get the bonus of charts by 'mood' and anything else that you can think of. I think it would work well here on BEA and it would be a great new feature.

[purple]

wow, I have missed or ignored this discussion for years! I think user implemented tags would work well; users can just add or edit tags like they can add or edit other album information now. Sure, someone might miss a genre tag by calling TMR rock/pop but then a user can add a more useful experimental rock tag; then, users should be able to vote somehow on the album page which genre tags they think fit best (perhaps by adding an icon next to each genre tag which, when clicked, votes for that genre tag, with the tag with the most votes showing up first in the genre tag list).

[Kiki]