Best Ever Albums

Re: sort by genre

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:23:07 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 12/21/2011 17:23

purple wrote:

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).

No no no no no no 😲 Voting for tags will be a disastor as it would result in the worse ones being at the top. The most vague ones like 'rock', 'pop', 'alternative', 'indie'. Some artists will have those 4 being the top ones in different orders. And then there is 'classic rock', 'soul', 'rnb' which would pigeon hole an album completely before it has a chance.

Removal of... "genres" is a good idea. Oversimplifies everything

Even removing the voting feature and having them preset would be a nuisance.

Re: sort by genre

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:56:08 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 12/21/2011 16:56

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).

Re: sort by genre

albummaster — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 10:07:30 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 11/30/2010 15:07

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.

Re: sort by genre

RFNAPLES — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:36:04 GMT

Author: RFNAPLES

Posted: 11/29/2010 15:36

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.

Re: sort by genre

Bork — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:59:42 GMT

Author: Bork

Posted: 11/29/2010 14:59

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.

Re: sort by genre

albummaster — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:25:52 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 11/29/2010 14:25

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.

Great going...

mszahrat — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 10:37:47 GMT

Author: mszahrat

Posted: 11/28/2010 15:37

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. 😁

Re: sort by genre

albummaster — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:22:50 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 06/28/2010 14:22

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.

Re: sort by genre

RFNAPLES — Mon, 8 Feb 2010 12:57:02 GMT

Author: RFNAPLES

Posted: 02/08/2010 17:57

Thanks for your efforts and the ETA.

Re: sort by genre

albummaster — Mon, 8 Feb 2010 12:28:12 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 02/08/2010 17:28

I'm in favour of broad genres at the top level and I proposed basing it on Gracenote's taxonomy as this seems to be widely used (we can always tweak things to our liking once the new system is live).

Adding this functionality is quite a big change to the structure of the site and is a big development task (we are also building a system to crowd-source data corrections at the same time). All going well, I think by Easter 2010, we should have something live on the site. There will be smaller site updates in the meantime whilst the bigger development work is taking place.

Re: sort by genre

RFNAPLES — Wed, 3 Feb 2010 23:18:51 GMT

Author: RFNAPLES

Posted: 02/04/2010 04:18

I support your idea of broad genre categories. We could have all types of semantic and definitional debates and still never get it right. Yet most of us can recognize the differences among Rock, Jazz, Classical, Country, and everything else.

Re: sort by genre

mikeyskywalker — Wed, 3 Feb 2010 23:13:23 GMT

Author: mikeyskywalker

Posted: 02/04/2010 04:13

I just want to bump this thread up to the top to keep the idea going.

I think adding genre's would be an excellent improvement, and better yet to just create the broad genre idea of rock, jazz, electronic, etc. Because I've been trying to find some good jazz albums, and this site just sadly doesn't cut it. I had to google search things such as "top 10 jazz albums." I got some great results, but wish it were all in this site. I understand that some transcend into other genres, but I think each album could be generalized if broad enough categories were made.

This site is incredible though, I've found many of my current favorite albums from here. 😄

Re: sort by genre

Norman Bates — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:05:01 GMT

Author: Norman Bates

Posted: 11/12/2009 16:05

Did the term "alternative" not appear right after punk, to define first the various post-punk indie scenes, then more or less anything not plainly middle-of-the-road? Seems anachronical to me to see The Velvet Underground filed under "Alternative", but I may very well be wrong.

What did Lincoln say ?

Re: sort by genre

RFNAPLES — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:16:48 GMT

Author: RFNAPLES

Posted: 11/10/2009 18:16

Remember what Lincoln said. ❗

Re: sort by genre

albummaster — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:14:05 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 11/10/2009 18:14

I am going to list some albums with tentative genres (from Gracenote) to see what the potential issues might be if we implemented things in this way. This is by no means a 'final' list, it's just a way of generating some debate to try and flesh out the mechanics since there is no definitive source for this data:

OK Computer - Radiohead
Genre: Alternative & Punk
Sub-genre(s): General Alternative, Art Rock

Revolver - The Beatles
Genre: Rock, Pop
Sub-genre(s): Classic Rock, General Pop

Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd
Genre: Rock, Alternative & Punk
Sub-genre(s): Progressive Rock, Art Rock

London Calling - The Clash
Genre: Alternative & Punk
Sub-genre(s): General Punk

Pet Sounds - Beach Boys
Genre: Pop
Sub-genre(s): General Pop

VU & Nico - Velvet Underground
Genre: Alternative & Punk
Sub-genre(s): Art Rock

Kid A - Radiohead
Genre: Alternative & Punk
Sub-genre(s): Art Rock

Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan
Genre: Folk
Sub-genre(s): General Folk

Funeral - Arcade Fire
Genre: Alternative & Punk
Sub-genre(s): Indie

Kind of Blue - Miles Davis
Genre: Jazz
Sub-genre(s): General Jazz

What's the Story (Morning Glory) - Oasis
Genre: Alternative & Punk
Sub-genre(s): Brit-Pop

What's Going On - Marvin Gaye
Genre: R&B
Sub-genre(s): Soul

Back in Black - AC/DC
Genre: Rock
Sub-genre(s): Hard Rock

Thriller - Michael Jackson
Genre: Pop
Sub-genre(s): General Pop

What strikes me from the above list of albums (leaving aside the accuracy of those classifications) is that the Gracenote sub-genre classifications do not add much detail to the main genre. A 'general' sub-genre as a child of the top-level genre tells me something is wrong with the structure of the genre tree. Also, charts such as 'Brit-Pop' do not really match up with what people are searching for on Google. I am not happy either with the AllMusic way of doing things (which was the other proposal), so we may have to roll our own list after all.

Re: sort by genre

Norman Bates — Mon, 9 Nov 2009 12:29:26 GMT

Author: Norman Bates

Posted: 11/09/2009 17:29

I got your point. I don't know if anybody will look for "world" albums, but still, it is the most practical way of putting it, you're right.

Re: sort by genre

albummaster — Mon, 9 Nov 2009 11:55:02 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 11/09/2009 16:55

I'm not keen on calling something 'world' either, particularly as some of my favourite music might be termed that but, on the other hand, having a catch-all for distinctive regional genres might be required.

For example, I currently live in Spain and 'flamenco' doesn't fit very easily into any contemporary category (indeed, 'true' flamenco could be divided into dozens of its own sub-genres - sevillianas, bulerias, malaguena etc etc).

I'm sure there are equivalents across the globe where this a local style of music which is different to anything else out there and we don't really want a situation where we create a top-level genre for each local style and then all of its variations (it would be too difficult to manage and the resulting charts/stats wouldn't be useful if there were only one or two albums in each of these 'world music' categories).

We have to keep in mind the purpose of the site; we are not a taxonomy of music albums where we are cataloguing/tagging everything into little pigeon holes - there are plenty of other sites that do that very well. This site is about listing the greatest albums in history and making it easy for site visitors to find them. The purpose of this functionality will be to facilitate this aim.

Re: sort by genre

Norman Bates — Mon, 9 Nov 2009 11:13:15 GMT

Author: Norman Bates

Posted: 11/09/2009 16:13

albummaster wrote:

the list that I posted was the 'top-level' genres, all sub-genres will be a 'child' of any of those at the top-level so something like soul will be a sub-genre of R&B.

I can understand that (although I don't know where Gracenote puts its "disco" sub-section, but never mind), but not for World, which is hardly a "genre". It's just our way of saying we don't particulalrly care for non-Western music, or consider it all as "alien" music. Seems a bit disturbing to me, but I willingly admit I don't have a good solution for this, as listing all the different genres of what is commonly called "world music" would be a hell of a task.

Re: sort by genre

albummaster — Mon, 9 Nov 2009 10:10:56 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 11/09/2009 15:10

the list that I posted was the 'top-level' genres, all sub-genres will be a 'child' of any of those at the top-level so something like soul will be a sub-genre of R&B. The list of genres is basically that used by Gracenote (previously CDDB). So, something like Marvin Gaye - What's Going On will appear in the R&B chart (top-level genre) and also any sub-genres that it has been assigned into.

I don't think we will classify albums in such as detail as RYM, we simply don't need to do that as the volume of albums on this site is a lot less, so cataloging(?) to such a fine degree will result in some charts with very few albums (and hence a useless chart).

I think keeping the list in a sort of parallel with that used by MP3 players will be useful to people once this functionality is live (Gracenote/CDDB is used by most MP3 players to download metadata) e.g. which album in a particular genre don't I possess that are in the top 10 list for a particular genre.

This is a hard technical problem to solve and I wanted to make sure that we get it right and that the resulting functionality is what people want.

albummaster

Re: sort by genre

Norman Bates — Mon, 9 Nov 2009 09:17:10 GMT

Author: Norman Bates

Posted: 11/09/2009 14:17

A "World" section troubles me a lot. Putting bossa nova, tango and say, desert blues in the same bag sounds to me like saying Western music has all these different cool styles, and the rest is all the same non-Western shit, except, strangely, reggae.

Also Electronica/Dance is really far too general to my liking. I don't think someone listening to Aphex Twin, and trying to get information on what cool elctronic music he could listen too, will gladly have to search through a list of Kylie Minogue stuff.

I would also add Funk somewhere in there. And Disco possibly.