Frustration re: Last.fm 'ordering us to fix tags' that are CORRECT already

I'm growing rather frustrated with the Spring Awakening artist wiki.

Last,fm staff have deemed the artist tag as an incorrect artist tag, and instructs users to re-tag the music as credited to Duncan Sheik. This includes deleting the picture and replacing it with a graphic equivalent telling us we must be too dense or whatnot to know we're wrong.

But ITUNES registers the Broadway Cast Recording this way! The actual recording itself was 'programmed' if you will to display Spring Awakening as the artist!! So how are we wrong?

Further, why are we being told to change our tags to Duncan Sheik? Duncan only wrote the music. The lyrics, the part that makes the songs unique, belong to Steven Sater. Why isn't he getting credit then as well?

Now, I've noticed before that the artist tag RENT auto forwards to Jonathan Larson, which makes sense I suppose. But there's no way I'm changing my tags and screwing up my hundreds of plays to give credit to only half the songwriting team and further, I'm not going to change a tag that the physical CD lists.

It's become a ridiculous child's game with last.fm staff deleting photos of the cast and the last.fm staff are WRONG. If Sater and Sheik are content with Spring Awakening as the artist, it's fine by me. Enough is enough. Leave it alone and worry about something more crucial, like the hideous revamp of the site layout (no time didn't make me like it more; I still hate it. But I digress)

likeadeadstar said:
I'm growing rather frustrated with the Spring Awakening artist wiki.that opening statement alone says it all - just like "RENT", "Spring Awakening" is not an artist, it's not a group, and it's not even the cast specifically. it's a broadway musical. the official site says it, wikipedia says it, musicbrainz says it, as do several other sites if you care to look it up.

edit: at best, it is an album by duncan sheik (this page) which also attributes the individual tracks to the respective cast members/artists.

Further, why are we being told to change our tags to Duncan Sheik? Duncan only wrote the music. The lyrics, the part that makes the songs unique, belong to Steven Sater. Why isn't he getting credit then as well?
you would have a point there though.

fijk319 said:
(But I still think Spring Awakening is the correct tag)

Is that the artist? No. So, you're wrong in this case.

Jester-NL said:
The artist is the people performing the music, not the musical/movie/anime/game.

But Duncan Sheik is not performing the music (except on a demo recording).

Sorry I was just trying to explain my point of view. I get that not everybody knows everything about every musical, but then why "force" us to chance our tags to something, which is wrong too? I mean... I guess then the actual cast would be the right tag, since they are performing the songs? It makes more sense, but when a song is performed by 25 people... that is a really long artist name :S

Musicals are the bane of music tagging.

In the case of musicals, Musicbrainz guidelines say that the composer should be the person who get's the overall credit. This gets quite confusing when you have both a lyricist and composer on a project, as I would agree both should get credit for it, but it doesn't always show that way (see Andrew Llyod Webber's PotO which Charles Heart likely deserves some credit).

This has always been hard for me. I totally agree with the "powers" that using the musical name as the artist is a cop-out and not appropriate, but I find giving the composer "artist" credit tough. There is after all a "composer" tag, but it is true in the world of musicals that giving ALL people who sing a certain song credit can be difficult, so what are people to do? That's hard to say as there is no real good solution. Musicbrainz tries to suggest the compromise as the composer getting the credit. Musicbrainz now offers "connections" where you can add who performed certain songs, but of course this information is not shown in ID3 tags... yet.

But as crazy as this all is, it is VERY true that in no way shape or form is the name of the SHOW an appropriate artist. I know this doesn't "help" the issue, but it's not an artist. Composer is a better compromise to solidify recordings of broadway music/musicals.

And just because iTunes says something doesn't make it true ;-)

The biggest problem is that no one out there has any real standards to "force" labels/artist/etc to identify their songs.

Musicbrainz is one project trying to promote standards. Last.fm has decided to use their standards, so if you don't like it, pound the pavement there. It's open source, it's user editable, and your voice could/can be heard.

Cheers.

fmera said:

that's a bit of a stretch ;)

as i've pointed out above, there is an album page for the musical. not only is the composer credited, but every principal cast member who performed in each of the tracks (i presume; i'm not familiar with this musical) is individually credited in that album, and in their respective artist pages as well. so that really is the fairest resolution since - as you implied - the musical is a collaborative effort involving many artists. and the least messy, when you think about the "Various Artists" fiasco that was such a headache in attributing tracks in compilation albums, movie soundtracks, etc.


I'd be far more content crediting it as shown on the album page, but again, because last.fm won't allow us to fix old plays to proper tags, I don't want to lose my stats. I've played The Bitch of Living 84 times - that's a lot of plays to lose considering it's in my top 5 played tracks since 2005. I credit SA bootlegs with the cast members singing, so it would reflect in the stats that eg I'm obsessed with Lauren Pritchard (whose original songs would combine with her SA recordings to create a proper number of plays for her as a singer)

I love Duncan for his work but I'm not giving him all the credit. And I won't change it until I can edit my own old plays to correct tags. I'm still annoyed that I'm going to lose 50+ plays of a song by The Fray that was poorly tagged by the person who gave it to me.

The problem with this whole musical issue is that Last.fm clearly doesn't have a consistent policy about tags. I can't agree with fijk319 and likeadeadstar more. If you want to standardise the tags that's more than welcome but then do standardise.

Jester-NLsaid:
And that is a (rather common) misconception. Not only for musicals, but it happens for anime, games, movies...
The artist is the people performing the music, not the musical/movie/anime/game.
Please get off that high horse for a moment and think. Much like Studogvetmed explained, musicals are problematic. The people who actually perform the songs are numerous, there's usually an ensemble of cast members, and cast changes from Broadway to London to any other place (or language) the musical's played at. It's close to impossible to credit the ones performing the music.

Moving on to the writers. It could be a solution, and I can understand why Musicbrainz and Last.fm are angling towards this. But then again comes the issue that it should be done properly, with crediting the writer of the lyrics as well as the composer. It also makes the statement "an artist is who performs the piece" completely false.

I fail to comprehend why creating a group entity from the musical's title is any worse than crediting the writers/composers. Just because you say so, it doesn't make it a misconception. It breaks down to what you believe would be a good solution rather than going against "rules".

And - like many fellow Last.fm users before me suggested - if you want to follow the guidelines set up by Musicbrainz, it's all fine. But in that case be consistent about it. After all if we, listeners, abide by your rules and retag our tracks they still will be wrong, won't they? Because MB lists Steven Sater as well.

Jester-NLsaid:
Musicbrainz is a site filled with user-generated content, that means that the information there is subjected to change. What counts more (imho) than the fact that a second name is added, is that Musicbrainz, and their guidelines state that your tags wrong. It tells you there as well that the musical is not the artist.
So basically what you say is that we should follow MB guidelines that the musical is not the artist. OK, can do. But that still leaves us with the problem that Last.fm only credits DS, and not SS. Also, even you mentioned the other issue: MB is user generated and subject to change. Meaning there's a constant threat of our tags to go obsolete.

What strikes me as hardest to grasp though, is what made Last.fm suddenly decide that this particular musical (Spring Awakening) needs a fix and just outlaw a whole bunch of users overnight. Why couldn't you redirect/overwrite the previous scrobbles, so people wouldn't have huge red warnings in their profiles? It is quite disheartening to a music fan that they are suddenty branded as ignorant of their favourite artist's proper name.

I even dare to suggest in a low voice that maybe consulting the actual community, the people who listen to musicals would have been the best course of action. Something like opening a thread about musical tagging and have a few weeks of debate, and only pick up the big electrical sponge and start clearing and rewriting data. (Or saying that from day X Last.fm will follow MB's rules. Thoughts?)

Studogvetmedsaid:
Musicbrainz is one project trying to promote standards. Last.fm has decided to use their standards, so if you don't like it, pound the pavement there. It's open source, it's user editable, and your voice could/can be heard.
But you're not! You use some kind of implementation that arbitrary removed SS from the artist. So we'd like to pound the pavement here a bit as well.

I see that Spring Awakening does not yet have one of the yellow boxes for "did you mean"... where users could help suggest to Last.fm that the writing/composer duo would be the correct arists.

Anyone can edit the wiki to reflect this suggestion as well.

Last.fm staff should do a much better job of pushing the musicbrainz standard and editing things as such. They are letting labels get away with things beyond the standard which makes our jobs much more difficult around here.

The advantage of musicbrainz is that if it can be pushed as a tagging mechanism for people it will assign a "ID" to the song, that will allow Last.fm to put all songs to the "right" place based on Musicbrainz information while allowing the regular users to keep their tags in whatever format/organization scheme they wish and solidfy the organization of things. That is the advantage of musicbrainz tagging with an official musicbrainz client as the official last.fm software and many stand alone plugins submit the musicbrainz ID.

innocent_sheep said:
To be honest, I don't really care if it's "correct" or not. For me, tagging is for my organizational purposes, and I prefer it if my musicals are tagged with the show name as the artist. The thing with last.fm is they are trying to assume that everyone will want to tag their music the same.

just a thought: you know when people have say, "madonna feat. justin timberlake" or "madonna FT justin timberlake" as an artist tag for one song rather than just plain "madonna"... isn't that more bothersome than us SA listeners simply tagging our songs as one "artist"? i just don't feel that it's an excessive tag considering that it has the most listeners out of all pages alike. i've seen people have high school musical songs (yeah, i know people who are big on real broadway musicals don't consider it an actual musical, but i'm just using it as an example), tagged as just about everything: listing the people singing that specific song, "high school musical" cast, or just the name of each movie, etc.... so if this is happening to spring awakening, is this also happening to other musicals? if not, why not? is this the only one?

innocent_sheep said:
Likewise, tagging Spring Awakening as "Duncan Shiek" is a TERRIBLE idea. Duncan Shiek has written pop music before, and I feel that mixing SA, which he didn't sing on -- with the pop music he did sing on makes no sense to me. Having RENT redirect to Jonathan Larson I understand because he never sang pop music on the radio, so those songs wouldn't be in his charts.


my thoughts exactly. i like my music being organized (even though i do try to keep things as simple as possible) and it's not that i don't recognize that he composed the music, i mean.. he was the reason i even started listening, but spring awakening is NOT duncan sheik to me.

if last.fm is getting down to specifics now, there should be some chart redirection or something... because there is basically no way you can force people to change their tags just because you think it's "wrong." of course technically, it is, but to most people technicality doesn't matter and it just depends on preference or organization. i guess putting a red blocky lettered photo as the default is the site's way of urging people to change the tags or else it will forever be on their profile page, but they can continuously keep deleting actual photos and leaving that there because i'm not changing the spring awakening tags until there's a good reason to.

DiamondDave said:
Well, I'm who edited and locked the Spring Awakening wiki. Why? As stated, Last.fm follows the Musicbrainz guidelines, which state that the composer (and not the lyricist) are considered to be the artist for musicals. That's why it has the redirect to Sheik alone. Personally, I'd rather see the lyricist included as part of the artist name, but that would require a change to the MB guidelines.
I looked up these guidelines you talk about. It turned out to be quite hard to tell which MB guideline applies to musicals. There is a MusicalSoundtrackGuideline, but that is (it states on the top of the page) not official, it's only a ProposedStyleGuideline. The OfficialStyleGuideline mentions at the ClassicalStyleGuide that it "also can be applied to musicals". Nevertheless, the actual official guide doesn't mention musicals from that point.

So did you base your decision on an unofficial guideline or an official that only has a sidenote mentioning that it can be applied to musicals?

The only thing I'm trying to show you here is that it's not all black and white. There aren't people that are clearly wrong or victims to a common misconception. It's debated even within the MB community.

DiamondDave said:
The change your tags image is supposed to grab your attention (or be annoying, if you prefer) and let you know that something isn't right. Ideally it does this before you end up with dozens or hundreds of plays of the artist in question.
Spring Awakening already (when I write this) has 404.040 plays. It has been an acceptable tag for years.

Jester-NL said:
Please do not confuse a wide-spread wrong with a right.
In the case of any musical/anime/game/movie scrobbling the name of that musical/anime/game/movie as the artist is wrong. No matter how often you do it, no matter who do it with you...
That is the crux with this whole thread: As long as you contribute whatever musical/anime/game/movie as an artist, your tags are not correct. There is no law of bigger numbers needed. Just a simple look at the fields that can be used in ID3-tags. And filling them in correctly
Now I understand... it's futile to reason, to research and try to find a logical solution, because at the end of the day we are just plain worng. Well, according to you.

Actually, if you bothered reading the previous posts in the topic, the situation regarding musicals is not as clear as you preach it is. Not even your chosen guide, Musicbrainz, is consistent on the topic. And it doesn't matter how many times you repeat that our tags are wrong. Look, I can do it too:

As long as you contribute the composer for whatever musical/anime/game/movie as an artist, your tags are not correct.

My word is as good as yours.

And then you have the audacity to bring up id3 tags. May I ask, have you heard about the Composer tag? What do you suggest we put in there?

Musicals are not performed by the composer or the lyricist, therefore they are not the artists. I accept your belief that the name of the musical/anime/whatever is not correct either.

Neither solution is better than the other. We should have the freedom to choose whichever we prefer.

I still challenge you to show me an official MB styleguide that expressly says that the composer should be the artist in case of musicals.

fmera said:
if you followed that ProposedStyleGuideline link to the page, it would say at the very top: "This page lists StyleGuidelines that are not yet official. Eventually they should then make it to the OfficialStyleGuidelines page, at the discretion of the StyleCouncil."

it's quite apparent musicbrainz are eager to close this gap in the existing official guidelines to cover musical productions, and that it's only a question of time before this proposed guideline becomes official.
No, I haven't followed the link I put in my post, obviously, why would I have...

Is it official? No.