Lukáš Lalinský <lalin...@gmail.com> writes: > Hi, > > This discussion is a little off-topic here, but I can't think of a > better group of active MB users to discuss a feature like this. > > I'd like MB to have some support for genres. This was apparently > discussed at the last MB summit, but I don't know details about that. > > http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/MusicBrainz_Summit/11/Session_Notes#Genres
I'll try and provide some details about what we talked about in the summit. Firstly, people want genre support. I know there are people that think it doesn't fit in with MusicBrainz, but people *do* want it, so it's something we at least need to have a stab at even if we don't ever implement it. One solution that was discussed at the summit is the introduction of a specific 'genre' field. This is basically the same as tags, but will be explicitly labelled as 'genre', will feature autocompletion, and will be pre-seeded with a collection of known genres. FreeBase have offered that to us, and we also have the option of using Wikipedia's list. There are other options too. The difference with tagging is that there would also be a way for people to show their agreement with a genre classification. A "+1" type button, for each genre tag, if you will. The idea here then being that anyone is welcome to contribute genres, and that the the most significant genre will bubble to the top with the whole +1 thing. I have mentioned before that it would be nice to have the idea of canonical tags, and I think this ties in really nicely with the system you propose. > The idea for now is just to define the genre lists and relations > between them. It does not deal with the problem of assigning entities > like artists to genres (I think that SoundUnwound has a nice solution > to this though). My idea is to add the concept of genres to > MusicBrainz, make it editable by users, linkable to other genres and > URLs. That way we can define genre trees. Then I'd like for each genre > to have a list of tags that the genre can appear as. This can be used > for autocompleting genres when adding tags, and whitelisting tags in > applications like Picard (it can be used to whitelist tags also from > other sources, like Last.fm). I think what I'm about to say is just echonging you, but nonetheless - here's a proposal that melds the 2 prior proposals together. Firstly, we ditch the separation between 'genres' and 'tags', unifying them in one display. We improve the tagging interface with clear tag separators (I'm partial to tag bubbles, personally). Each tag on an entity also has some sort of button which allows the user to 'vote agreement' with a tag - but rather than having some separator system here, it simply means the user wants to apply that tag themselves too. Next, we have genre entities, which make up a genre graph - each edge can identify some type of relationship between genres, in order to capture ideas of 'encompasses', 'envolved from', 'takes influences' from, etc. With a better - and hopefully more visible and active - tagging system, we get more tags, so users can associate a tag with a genre node. I think this is pretty much, if not exactly what you are proposing, and if so I'd be in agreement with you :) The only thing that worries me is that the genre entities themselves will need to be edited, and this is good to be very difficult to curate, because it's very fuzzy, and very subjective. I can certainly picture editing wars... "NO! Jungle is NOT drum & bass, do not merge them!" > Does any of this make sense? Do you think it's a good idea? Yes and yes :) - Ollie _______________________________________________ MusicBrainz-style mailing list MusicBrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
