"Clean your tags" fascism!

I think the "Clean your tags" thing is becoming a bigger nuisance than the wrong tagging.

I get that ugly logo or message in my face even when I have tagged all tracks from a cd exactly like the cd-labels, which is the standard I use.

I also have my standard for using punctuation an abbrevations that sorts music correctly alphatbetically in my media library.
Then some moderator wannabee shoves a "That's not what Musicbrainz says" in my face.
But it's how I handle my files that is important to me. And I still want to use Last.fm to see how I play my music and show that to others. Last.fm is a service, and if they can't handle the problem they will have to let it go.

Musicbrainz are as arbitrary as this bunch (we users and staff on last.fm, me included), only more elitist. Even my own musical projects can't be called what I say they are called because someone else got there before me.

So...
What I really want to is a slightly more humble way of asking us users to conform our tags. Last.fm isn't good enough to offer a perfect service on this part without sacrificing a lot of other what makes it so good despite this lack.

And if we don't want to conform, then we still don't deserve that sorry ass attitude of those homeland security types that wipes out a bio that kindly refers to the other common name tags and replaces it with a "Get your tags right!" finger in our faces.

possibly ironic statement saing what?

i didnt realize this was like....an issue...

To be honest I never even visited Musicbrainz and i'm trying to keep it like that. Things are working out fine so far without it.

But the wiki pages are supposed to be a source of information that you get when playing your music, and if a wiki page is locked or constantly erased, it will not work like that. I want people to be informed about what they listen to and I write a lot of bios. But i find it really stupid to offer an service and then make it not work like last.fm do.

And it's especially annoying with instances like The Mothers of Invention which will turn out like Frank Zappa. OK, theyre *this* close, but not the same, hence the different names.

Or swedish band Post who are scrobbled like The Post because there are another band with that name who got "merged" back when last.fm still did so. Though the meaning of the bandnames are totally different since "post" is also a swedish word meaning something entirely different without the definite article "the".

I only have a problem with this because last.fm is so rigid about it when they clearly have errors in the system. That's why I wish the could be a little nicer about this.

@ gosurori:
Well, that's a little bit different. I actually talk about all those people who actually keep their songs in some kind of order.

@ Bifnepasu:
I thing there's a little confusion around the fact that there's a lot of different sorts of tags. I am only talking about digital sound file ID-tagging that says which artist, song and what album it is you are listening to from whatever you play it on, your computer/portable whatever.
The taste-tags that I think you refer to are something completely different. And I don't refer to HTML/BBS tags either, just in case. ;)

Yes, I do miss a few things about what last.fm offers, but not the main thing I like last.fm for, which is registering what I listen to and how much. That will work anyway, just like the forums, journals, friends, neighbours, shoutboxes, message systems, events etc.
I know how to use last.fm to work for my intentions.

The thing I'm mainly missing out on might be the music recommendations, which propably is the least reason for which I scrobble, since almost all automated recommendations point to things I'm musically moving away from.

New music I find outside last.fm.
Mostly I'm trying to introduce music to last.fm that isn't here already.

And renaming the tags that are in error would, as I said in the original post, lessen the quality of my music library at home. My system is properly thought through and in a majority of all conflicts, more correct than that of last.fm/Musicbrainz.

I do look forward to the days when we have some semblance of the old moderation system back up, so those artists that are incorrectly redirecting to others can be fixed, and others can be properly moderated to keep the data together.

I've never found or heard an explanation or the story behind why it was changed, or dropped. Why did you drop the old moderation, "merging" and even the possibility to change obvious errors? Was it technical or practical?

Wikis are usually locked because of edit wars and other crap like that, if you want to make a change then feel free to PM me with what you want and I'll try add it to the wiki.

Sorry for bringing the thread offtopic :)

I am kinda in the middle. I ALWAYS tag my new albums and use my special pattern for file naming, but I don't quite get all the people shouting at another "tag your files, now!". Yeah, I know, the artists' pages are one big mess, but hey, it's not that bad actually, and you won't get it better by asking everyone to get through their often vast collections of music and change every single file according to some musicbrainz site (well, who says they are correct anyways?!). It simply won't happen.

i say we make some flags and banners and march down to the last.fm hq. a good old fashion protest is whats needed.

evilangela said:
The thing is, correct tags are the only way to identify the artist and song you're playing. If your tags are incorrect, then you're missing out on what Last.fm could be giving you. With track tags it's not as big of a deal, but if you've got the artist tags wrong, then you're missing out on a lot.

I understand that much. The problem for me is understanding the underlying philosophy for tagging. For example, I have noticed that in instrumental classical music the artist field usually contains the name of the composer and not the orchestra, conductor, etc. The composer field seems to be ignored by last.FM. In vocal pieces, such as arias or duets, the singers tend to be lists in the artist field. For people who collect classical music it is not unusual to many different recordings of the same work. If only the composer is identified in the artist field it would seem to make it impossible to differentiate between recordings. It seems to me that using the artist field as a performers field and making use of the composer field for the actual author of the piece makes the most since IMHO ;-)

jPeMelin said:
Occasionaly I got a reprimand for som minor error in my writing, but I respect such things and I have learned the style now, but I don't understand the rigid policy on the subject of ID-tags with argument already presented above. That's what I'm trying to get an understanding about.

Is there an explanation of this policy somewhere. Is is there some place where it is cleary detailed? I have taken the time to go through the bulk of my collection to replace the 'various artists' with the actual performers.

Another obvious example on this topic is the page for the artist Pink, 99% of the tracks scrobbled are by the american singer... all top tracks, artist connections, albums, radio etc. are also for that singer... but yet the mod locked the wiki and images insisting everyone change their tags to P!nk which is obviously not where majority of the tags are going to go, ever. It's annoying seeing the lame unknown japanese band picture when that's not who people are going to the page for/listening to. XP

I tag my tracks EXACTLY according to the CD. I think i listen to less mainstream music or something because i have never had a moderator tell me to 'fix the tracks'