Best Ever Albums

Re: Recommendations forum

Skinny — Thu, 5 Jun 2014 11:00:57 GMT

Author: Skinny

Posted: 06/05/2014 15:00

Gowienczyk wrote:

Sounds like last.fm's approach which can be skewed pretty weirdly and again its pretty variable. I hope there's quite a bit of checks and balances to the system beyond simplicity otherwise you will find a lot of "majority population thinks x is y when it is actually z".

Gowienczyk wrote:

...no and the condescending remarks are not at all appreciated.

The hypocrisy here is hilarious. Still, better a condescending attitude than the odd condescending remark, eh?

Re: Recommendations forum

Anonymous — Thu, 5 Jun 2014 10:48:03 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 06/05/2014 14:48

Skinny wrote:

All of this is beginning to sound very exciting. The idea of BEA as an Allmusic-style reference point - working alongside its current state as a place to build/collate charts and a lively, bustling forum - is one I wholeheartedly support.

This.

I usually look forward to site updates, but this one is especially exciting. You have such an incredible storehouse of music knowledge on the forums here and this would be a great way to integrate that collective wisdom into the content of the main site.

Re: Recommendations forum

albummaster — Thu, 5 Jun 2014 10:01:48 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 06/05/2014 14:01

Gowienczyk wrote:

Agree, it needs to be done carefully, which is mostly why it hasn't been implemented yet (it's a lot of work). Also, I think different people can have wildly different ideas of what genre an album should be in. I think to get around this, probably the site will also allow people to run charts based on their own tags so that you don't have to use the crowd-sourced data if you don't want to.

Re: Recommendations forum

mickilennial — Thu, 5 Jun 2014 09:43:35 GMT

Author: mickilennial

Posted: 06/05/2014 13:43

Skinny wrote:

Oh god please stop with the genre nazism already. We're all sorry that society doesn't quite grasp the exact minutiae of "emo".

...no and the condescending remarks are not at all appreciated .

albummaster wrote:

There have been previous threads which discussed in some detail different ideas for achieving this objective. The idea which seemed to have the most prominence was to 'tag' albums not just with genre data but also with 'mood' (or anything else) so that albums that aren't easily classified (& there are lots of them) can still be discovered via an alternate means.

The way I envisaged this might work is that genre charts would be derived from the current rankings to retain consistency so that you could filter the overall chart by genre. Albums would be tagged with one or more genre(s) (& other meta-tags) so that you could see the top-ranked jazz albums, top-ranked soundtracks, best psychedelic albums etc. This is exactly the way in which the current year & decade charts are currently derived. I don't think having genre police determining the genre for each album will be the way we will do things. Personally, I'd rather crowd-source the information so that everybody has an input, and put in place some mechanism to avoid data-vandalism via voting etc.

Re: Recommendations forum

albummaster — Thu, 5 Jun 2014 08:50:19 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 06/05/2014 12:50

Gowienczyk wrote:

Genre charts are very different as some publications have proven in the past, I'd actually recommend against it unless we have some system that is better than what RYM has (which only works when the voters are informed).

Re: Recommendations forum

Patman360 — Thu, 5 Jun 2014 08:12:06 GMT

Author: Patman360

Posted: 06/05/2014 12:12

I'm all for tagging, provided it isn't overdone like sp4cetiger said. There could be a limit of say 5 tags at most per album (I doubt many albums would need more than that realistically) and that each tag would have to be approved by a certain number of the sites data moderators (Rules out the need for creating a new position of editors), I'm not sure how many approvals would be needed, though I reckon it would need to be different based on how popular the album is. These tags in turn could lead to overall charts for each genre tag where possible.

I'm quite happy with the current forum format but I am excited about seeing how it can further develop from here.

Re: Recommendations forum

Skinny — Thu, 5 Jun 2014 06:52:55 GMT

Author: Skinny

Posted: 06/05/2014 10:52

Gowienczyk wrote:

Oh god please stop with the genre nazism already. We're all sorry that society doesn't quite grasp the exact minutiae of "emo".

Re: Recommendations forum

mickilennial — Thu, 5 Jun 2014 06:50:25 GMT

Author: mickilennial

Posted: 06/05/2014 10:50

Genre charts are very different as some publications have proven in the past, I'd actually recommend against it unless we have some system that is better than what RYM has (which only works when the voters are informed).

Re: Recommendations forum

Skinny — Thu, 5 Jun 2014 06:50:19 GMT

Author: Skinny

Posted: 06/05/2014 10:50

All of this is beginning to sound very exciting. The idea of BEA as an Allmusic-style reference point - working alongside its current state as a place to build/collate charts and a lively, bustling forum - is one I wholeheartedly support. I especially like the ideas of genre-tagging, having genre "hubs" of some sort that are looked after by a select team of editors, and of having user-approved (positive) reviews of albums visually prominent when somebody visits an album page (as well as having a comment section underneath, of course). It would be tricky to implement all of this, but I think that done successfully it can only help make BEA a more interesting and appealing place to be.

Re: Recommendations forum

albummaster — Thu, 5 Jun 2014 06:39:01 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 06/05/2014 10:39

I've been reflecting on this thread, and I really like the idea of adding richer content to the site & this is exactly the kind of thing that would benefit the main site so that site visitors could benefit in the most direct way from the combined pool of knowledge that we have here.

The way I'd like the site to evolve longer term would be for it to have charts by genre, but alongside these could be a narrative about the genre (description, history etc). In the same way, the year and decade section of the site could quite easily incorporate a commentary for each year and decade (perhaps including a bit of background about the major music events of each time period).

The content for these areas would need to be edited and it would have to use a similar 'voice' so site visitors get a consistent experience. No one person will have the depth of knowledge for every genre or time period, so perhaps there could be a coordinated group of BEA editors (if such a role was created), who could be credited alongside their contributions to add a bit of kudos (in the same way that some other sites have their own on-site team of editors). Going further, these editors could also write 'in-house' album or artist reviews which could be prominently displayed on each relevant page (these could be editorially selected from the best existing comments, or could be specially written). I'm not sure how other sites coordinate this type of activity, but it definitely sounds like something worth looking into. (Apologies for going off at a tangent.)

Re: Recommendations forum

meccalecca — Wed, 4 Jun 2014 13:50:44 GMT

Author: meccalecca

Posted: 06/04/2014 17:50

If I understand correctly, I think tagging might be the perfect solution. Anything that makes a thread more easily searchable makes sense. I definitely see AM's point about subforums. Once you start creating them, where do you stop. The simplicity of the current forums definitely helps a lot and we don't want to lose that

Re: Recommendations forum

Anonymous — Wed, 4 Jun 2014 05:52:25 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 06/04/2014 09:52

Thanks for the response, AM. Tagging would be a great addition to the site, I think. I guess it depends on how it's implemented, but it sounds like it could serve basically the same purpose as a sub-forum, so long as it isn't overdone (i.e., too many tags per post). The key thing for me is what RepoMan said about saving carefully written posts for future browsing. It's sometimes difficult for me to motivate myself to write detailed responses to threads if I know they're going to fall into oblivion in a day or two. If these genre threads were all tagged with the same marker, then they could be more easily accessed in the future.

Re: Recommendations forum

albummaster — Wed, 4 Jun 2014 05:31:09 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 06/04/2014 09:31

Apologies for the delay in responding, I've had a few things going on away from the site. I've been through the thread and there's quite a few different issues here. It started off talking about recommendations and finished talking about genres. My own view on recommendations is that I'd like the main site to be the vehicle that helps provide these & a recommendation system is on the list to be done. A month (or so) back, we were all discussing an idea from The Poe which would allow people to leave recommendations on people's charts & give rec's to each other - http://www.besteveralbums.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8785 .This was discussed in quite a bit of detail and we all thought it was worthy of adding to the site. Genres are also on the list to be added to the site as well.

Regards the forums being restructured to accommodate genre specific discussion, once we go down the road of splitting out different types of topic from the music forum, where do we stop? I mean, *all* Music topics could be classified into sub-forums e.g. aotd, cotd, upoftd... then we have BEA artists promoting their own work, BEA user interviews, song discussion, artist discussion, album listening club etc etc. All of these topics could legitimately have a forum of their own, so why don't we do it with everything & why should we treat this area any differently?

The main issue that I'm getting from this thread is that the forums don't allow people to easily find all the content around a given discussion area, so how about tagging as a solution to this rather than adding sub-forums? Tagging of topics (& posts) would allow existing discussion to be kept together but people could drill into a particular area of discussion if they wanted to e.g. a competition could be tagged with the competition name so all related posts could be kept together, a post (or topic) about a genre could be tagged with the genre name etc to allow all posts about that genre to be displayed. This is exactly how Twitter and other sites work.

I'm listening to people's view about the benefits of sub-forums, but I'm personally not a big fan of forums that contain lots of sub-forums (with half of those empty or not being used). It makes discussion cumbersome to browse, adds confusion to a user about where to post (potentially putting them off from contributing), and if you want to find out where the action is, instead of looking in five different places you now have to look in 20. Once discussion become spread out, the site can look quieter than it is & first-time visitors (potential members) might get the impression not a lot is going on. In addition, just adding sub-forums for one area would make the forums lop-sided and open the floodgates for more sub-forums by setting a precedent that a sub-forum can be created for each new topic area within Music.

We've debated as a community lots of times before about restructuring the forums (which is my view of what this is about), but there are so many blurred lines within Music that it's impossible to do this cleanly without having lots of cross-over between topic areas & the benefits of changing things don't (in my mind) outweigh the negatives of keeping things the same. I think a solution can be achieved to the discovery issue on the forums via an alternate means and (for recommendations) by adding more functionality to the main site.

[Apologies for a slightly rushed post.]

Re: Recommendations forum

Anonymous — Fri, 30 May 2014 06:28:27 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 05/30/2014 10:28

martintho wrote:

Quote:

"Most music buffs tackle music history from a genre point of view"

how did you come to know this as a fact?

imo (...) the best music knows less genre boundaries

[/quote]

Haha! That's your major takeaway?! Well, I'm just happy that someone read my post.

Peace.

Re: Recommendations forum

martintho — Fri, 30 May 2014 02:36:49 GMT

Author: martintho

Posted: 05/30/2014 06:36

Quote:

"Most music buffs tackle music history from a genre point of view"

how did you come to know this as a fact?

imo (...) the best music knows less genre boundaries[/quote]

Re: Recommendations forum

Romanelli — Thu, 29 May 2014 20:35:01 GMT

Author: Romanelli

Posted: 05/30/2014 00:35

In closing (for me): the only thing I have a problem with is creating a new forum. If it can be done using links (as in Listening Logs), then fine. But I do not think a new forum is good for anything.

Re: Recommendations forum

Anonymous — Thu, 29 May 2014 19:35:18 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 05/29/2014 23:35

sp4cetiger wrote:

Okay, so here's an attempt to flesh out a detailed implementation of what is really a combo of Happymeal's and Nech's ideas (also trying to address drakonium's and Romanelli's concerns):

- We have a dedicated subforum in which each thread is the result of a scheduled contribution from a forum member (they volunteer ahead of time). The process would be similar to what I did here:

Sign up to contribute to the history of music review

- Individual threads in the subforum will address a topic that is broad enough to solicit a decent number of recs from the forum community, but narrow enough that it's useful to people -- for example, "Metal" would be too broad and "Hair metal from 1982" would be too narrow (probably). Anything in music history is fair game, though.
- The user who signed up will start the thread, giving whatever information and initial recs they think would constitute a useful starting point. Other users just contribute any recs/conversation they want.
- We could have a stickied thread in the subforum devoted to discussing the topics to be contributed, both for quality control and so that they don't overlap too much.
- Activity in the threads will likely die quickly, but this is okay, because their primary purpose is to provide recs for users in the long term.
- There might be some overlap with the main Music forum, but the thread topics will all be very specific, so that it's easy to browse and new users can use them for recs for years to come.
- You could expect regular thread contributions from me. If this happens, I'll shift my focus from the history thread to writing threads for the genre/history subforum.

Thoughts?

I think you nailed it. �'�

I guess a key point that I wanted to raise here is that I've been treated to some of the best writing on music I've ever read since my time here, but it's a shame that most of it gets lost or buried forever in some thread. This has two bad outcomes. The obvious is that a great piece of writing on a particular genre is buried. The more pervasive outcome is that people are going to be less inclined to take the time to write a thoughtful, creative analysis on something when they know it will have a limited shelf life. Most music buffs tackle music history from a genre point of view, so this seems to be an ideal setting to...

1) Recommend the essentials/required listening in any given genre
2) archive some great writing & analysis (KoolKeithSweat's introduction to post-rock a few weeks ago comes to mind as well as Lethal's Hip Hop 101),
3) serve as a treasure trove of recs
4) perhaps most importantly, encourage some great conversations about the bands and the albums in the genre.

For instance, creator and I were having a pretty cool discussion about how to approach Unwound's discography and Unwound's nuanced approach to post-hardcore in the Recommendations thread. I'm sure if it was in a dedicated post-hardcore forum other fans of the genre would have chimed in.

Also, as it currently stands, any time a user has an interest in a given genre, we are starting from scratch instead of being able to utilize the tens to hundred of posts that have already probably been made on that topic.

Re: Recommendations forum

Anonymous — Thu, 29 May 2014 19:08:10 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 05/29/2014 23:08

Dingerbell wrote:

The way in which it has to work is that people do a bit of research before the topic is introduced, with several people listening to several albums that they find, and posting maybe one or two (something manageable) albums with a short review/explanation on what the album is like, which other artists it may sound like and who it may appeal to.

That is a pretty brilliant solution to some people's qualms. You're certainly correct in the idea that this shouldn't just be a "post it and leave" type thing. It has to be far more interactive than that to work optimally. This means this'll need more time than anticipated so perhaps we can get this running within a week or two if the new forum (genre exploration or something like that) is OKed.

Re: Recommendations forum

Anonymous — Thu, 29 May 2014 19:07:07 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 05/29/2014 23:07

Okay, so here's an attempt to flesh out a detailed implementation of what is really a combo of Happymeal's and Nech's ideas (also trying to address drakonium's and Romanelli's concerns):

- We have a dedicated subforum in which each thread is the result of a scheduled contribution from a forum member (they volunteer ahead of time). The process would be similar to what I did here:

Sign up to contribute to the history of music review

- Individual threads in the subforum will address a topic that is broad enough to solicit a decent number of recs from the forum community, but narrow enough that it's useful to people -- for example, "Metal" would be too broad and "Hair metal from 1982" would be too narrow (probably). Anything in music history is fair game, though.
- The user who signed up will start the thread, giving whatever information and initial recs they think would constitute a useful starting point. Other users just contribute any recs/conversation they want.
- We could have a stickied thread in the subforum devoted to discussing the topics to be contributed, both for quality control and so that they don't overlap too much.
- Activity in the threads will likely die quickly, but this is okay, because their primary purpose is to provide recs for users in the long term.
- There might be some overlap with the main Music forum, but the thread topics will all be very specific, so that it's easy to browse and new users can use them for recs for years to come.
- You could expect regular thread contributions from me. If this happens, I'll shift my focus from the history thread to writing threads for the genre/history subforum.

Thoughts?

Re: Recommendations forum

Dingerbell — Thu, 29 May 2014 18:51:05 GMT

Author: Dingerbell

Posted: 05/29/2014 22:51

drakonium wrote:

It's too late for me to think about that, but I'm just posting to remind everyone that Geevy had already organized something like that a few months ago (though only obscure genres were supposed to be targeted), and that the first genre-specific thread (about no wave, back then) sank in a few days. A very sad failure for a good idea.

This.

It's a good idea in practice, but I don't see it working unless people actively look themselves, and then pass on what they find. If there's one guy just posting a massive list of recs then people are just going to fill up their wish lists with albums they probably won't hear- or at least immediately- so they'll miss the initial discussion, which sort of misses the point.

The way in which it has to work is that people do a bit of research before the topic is introduced, with several people listening to several albums that they find, and posting maybe one or two (something manageable) albums with a short review/explanation on what the album is like, which other artists it may sound like and who it may appeal to.