Automated & manual Artist disambiguation: How to drastically improve this site,…

UPDATED,

List of Ideas currently.

*New scrobbler API that uses artist/album/track ID3 identification along with decision tree/compare & contrast algorithms to identify and properly disambiguate two artists with the same name

*determine simple differences in the same track, like using parenthesis vs brackets

*determine secondary artist names inside ID3 data, so that feat. pres. vs. & artist combos all get a scrobble and artists that remix tracks. The scrobble would do this again, when looking at the ID3 data by seeing those keywords or artists name.

*A discogs inspired additional layer of user driven disambiguation and correction system of all the information on the site.

*layered tag system with a list of specific tags, 3 layers, genre,style and general tags, similar again to discogs. This will allow users to filter artists more efficiently when so desired, by filtering out certain tags, or layers of tags.

*integrate some of the techniques of blip.fm. Mainly the ability to share, and communicate about music in real time, in micro-blog format. But instead of posting videos each user would have a "friends activity stream" on their homepage and their user page. As songs go by in real time, any songs that have streams available on lfm, on any sites that have integrated the scrobbler api or eventually the youtube videos embedded on the site. Users can then "listen back" to their friends and the users get that in a separate stream on their user page and/or their activity stream.

*Also in the same fashion as blip.fm, every scrobble that isn't done from your computer would have a linkback icon in the recent plays directly to where the song is located from any site that has the API integrated (this is also incentive for sites to integrate the API, 10's of thousands of little linkbacks to their site pages).



Thought experiment on the process.
iTranscendence said:
For example lets use the Aes Dana. Lets say I got an unreleased track from Vincent, all it had was artist and track name, no album. The scrobbler would go through all the albums of both artists to see if there was a matching track name. When it found none it would check other ID3 tags if any were present. This would limit the scope of data which the scrobbler was dealing with thus reducing processing.

Lets say for the sake of my thought experiment here that no other data was filled out. This is where the "discogs" side of this disambiguation process would work. A simple pop up could ask the user to identify if it was "Aes Dana" or "Aes Dana" and show a thumb of the two artist pages with their most popular tags underneath them. It could also have a section within the window to add relevant tags to the track. In the event that I didn't know what to tag it with, which artist was which, or simply ignored/chose not to fill out the data. That track would remain flagged as an incomplete until another user did fill it in, either manually or by scobbling the same track with the missing data. Once the scrobbler was able to make a definite determination, that track and all it's statistics would be moved under the sub-branch URL for that correct artist (last.fm/music/Aes+Dana) or (last.fm/music/Aes+Dana+(2) )

I understand in general the two artists one name has been brought up, I read the FAQ, I'm not retarded, or lazy. My point isn't so much just the artist thing. My point is last.fm should utilize the discogs.com model to solve all these problems.

As I stated in my original post there are two ways it could be determined

1. chronologically by when the artist first appeared on last.fm (how its done on discogs)

or

2. Chronologically by when the band was founded

Edit: and the first band would just be the name without any number after it.

brtkrbzhnv said:
What I'm asking you is how Last.fm would decide which I'm listening to (or if it's a new Tatar that hasn't been scrobbled before).
I do pretty much agree with you. last.fm doesn't decide which artists are listened to.

iTranscendence said:
A simple cross reference of the song name, and style tags could easily determine that.
How about tracks that aren't in whatever database it is you want Last.fm to cross-reference against? I mean, the Tatar I listen to wasn't in MusicBrainz before I added it.

Why not something like:

Spearhead
Spearhead (UK)
Spearhead (UK 2)

Witchtrap (Col)
Witchtrap (Trk)

??

Organize the artists with a country suffix?

iTranscendence said:
brtkrbzhnv said:
iTranscendence said:
A simple cross reference of the song name, and style tags could easily determine that.
How about tracks that aren't in whatever database it is you want Last.fm to cross-reference against?

The database I want it to cross reference against is last.fm's own database.

In the event that last.fm has never had a single play from either "tatar" it would as it does now, ask for your assistance in filling out the information for this artist, wikipedia and discogs are great references for that

That information could then either be reviewed by a mod, and/or forwarded to the label/artist in some manner on whatever their website is. This type of artist contact by last.fm would help bring this websites potential to more artists attention, thus getting them more involved as well.

But people don't want to have to fill in forms, they just want everything to work. So there'd be a huge black hole of songs that the mods/labels haven't got round to claiming yet. Plus, people often have different names for the same songs, either due to poor tagging or because of undefined naming regulations e.g. "Poker Face (feat. Snoop Dogg) (Remix)". Also, what happens if two identically named bands have an identically named song?

Whosthatrandom said:
iTranscendence said:
brtkrbzhnv said:
iTranscendence said:
A simple cross reference of the song name, and style tags could easily determine that.
How about tracks that aren't in whatever database it is you want Last.fm to cross-reference against?

The database I want it to cross reference against is last.fm's own database.

In the event that last.fm has never had a single play from either "tatar" it would as it does now, ask for your assistance in filling out the information for this artist, wikipedia and discogs are great references for that

That information could then either be reviewed by a mod, and/or forwarded to the label/artist in some manner on whatever their website is. This type of artist contact by last.fm would help bring this websites potential to more artists attention, thus getting them more involved as well.

But people don't want to have to fill in forms, they just want everything to work. So there'd be a huge black hole of songs that the mods/labels haven't got round to claiming yet. Plus, people often have different names for the same songs, either due to poor tagging or because of undefined naming regulations e.g. "Poker Face (feat. Snoop Dogg) (Remix)". Also, what happens if two identically named bands have an identically named song?

That's just not entirely true, otherwise sites like discogs and wikipedia wouldn't exist, they didn't get there by osmosis. Yes, there will be people who don't participate, but changing the format to this will inevitably draw people who take pride in making sure the information is correct.

I wholeheartedly agree about no standardization in song labeling being a problem. I have my own opinions about how it should be done as well, but that is a whole other discussion entirely, and this will never be a perfect process.

Lets just take your example and show how it IMO should play out on last.fm.

1.Should the feat. go under artist, or go under the song or some other label?

Traditionally what You see from wiki or discogs is it goes under the artist for accuracy. Labels tend to exclude features from the 'artist list' when submitting to a site like this as to not steal any limelight from their artist. They may put it as a footnote on the song or something else.

What would be nice from a last.fm perspective is if the software could key in on the primary musician, but if you searched for an artist any song they are featured on would come up as well.

Following standardized rules, lets say your song came up through the audioscrobbler and it didn't recognize

Pokerface - "song name" (feat. Snoop Dogg) (remix)

it did however detect a similar track in the database

Pokerface Feat. Snoop Dogg - "song name" (remix)

Now there is software they have already put in place that will auto fix your music to match what is on last.fm but what if you disagree with that format. You could just tell the system it's the same track, and the scrobbler could just designate that a variated name of the same track, that way either way it's set up last.fm pulls up the same song data.

Good idea! Its not perfect, but it would be better than the current confusion when bands share the same name. Obviously it would rely on user input to work, but I doubt this would be a problem on a site like last.fm, and the autocorrect function is already there to allocate tracks to the correct artist.

i've said it before, and i'll say it now, if the artists were to be separated (and they have to be, sooner or later) they'll have to do it by artist ID's, without any extra complications.

TiedToTheBells said:
and the autocorrect function is already there to allocate tracks to the correct artist.

Not being funny but that thing only seems 2 works about 1/2 the time.

Ive actually Typed out info from the back of some of my cd covers only to have the autotag Re-tag em.

some of the auto retags give me CD#rs and track #rs in the title.
& some where the actual full title isnt even typed out.

& U have to like either hit the lil redirect button 10mil times or have a bunch of ppl do it to actually get it fixed.

with the song titles I trust discogs more than Music Brainz

not that my post really has anything to do with the original post but ya


The fact that it is inconsistent is the reason I believe it should just ask you the user when it's unsure about what it's detecting. It would be nice if we had discerning algorithms, but that isn't a common thing yet.

iTranscendence said:
An artist ID would work for the databasing, but it doesn't help someone who is using google, or the internal search engine at last.fm which is why you just put the (2), (3) etc after the names, then when you search them it brings up the whole list, and could have their style of music, to help the user find it quicker.

artist disambiguation page?
i don't see why adding (2), (3) and similar would help, how would we still know which band we're looking for without the additional info about them. if we were to use a disambiguation page we would have a list of all the artists sharing a name and a quick description about them. much easier solution, IMHO.

edit: and yes, artist ID would still be used in a database, but they would have their name, i surely would want to type rf63df48h9-6ghze23 to search for a band :D
different artists with a same name can indeed share a name, but they can't share an ID.

I agree with the original poster.

For me, last.fm is about the statistics. I couldn't care less if the radio is charging money, since I don't use it regularly (I do feel for the people who do though - if last.fm started charging for stats, I'd be pissed). So needless to say, I feel that the slideshow radio is totally useless (I still have some on my free trial), and the staff could be working on making the stats more accurate. You know, instead of making a pretty slideshow app.

We need merging and automatic redirecting of incorrectly spelled artist names and separation of same named artists. Otherwise, it looks like I'm listening to the Metal bands "Aria" and "Sakura" instead of the female J-hiphop artists with the same name.

I don't mean to be cruel, but...come on. The automatic corrector needs to be a priority.