Ok, so having been at the front lines of the "indie" genre-war for the past several years, I can very confidently say that: "Indie" alone is not a genre. You could easily make indie rock, indie...
Ok, so having been at the front lines of the "indie" genre-war for the past several years, I can very confidently say that:
"Indie" alone is not a genre. You could easily make indie rock, indie grunge, indie hip-hop, etc... indie is how the music was produced, not the genre itself.
People will invariably use "indie" to mean "indie.rock".
The corollary to 1&2, is that the only possible way to enforce a consistent tagging system at scale is by pulling the primary tags directly from Musicbrainz, Discogs, etc. That said, we can more easily decide on what our tagging system should be (and possibly even enforce it) when ~music is this size.
A couple other thoughts (I will likely have many more tomorrow):
I would definitely support a hierarchical tagging scheme, rock.indie being a good example. This would seem a natural extension to when there are subgroups of ~music, for instance if you submitted to ~music.rock.indie, the tags rock.indie could automatically be inherited.
Not everything will fit in such a hierarchy, and that's ok too. Sometimes we all find some really far-out stuff, or we just don't know what the appropriate genre really should be. This is where a) tag editing permissions and b) auto-populated tag / titling information comes in.
It must be as easy as physically possible for users to correctly follow whatever tagging / titling guidelines we come up with -- hence my focus on automation -- otherwise, they simply will not be followed.
I think this is important for us to remember, and it's a nice example of how we can make management of ~music different from /r/listentothis. If we implement a good automated system we can...
Not everything will fit in such a hierarchy, and that's ok too. Sometimes we all find some really far-out stuff, or we just don't know what the appropriate genre really should be. This is where a) tag editing permissions and b) auto-populated tag / titling information comes in.
I think this is important for us to remember, and it's a nice example of how we can make management of ~music different from /r/listentothis. If we implement a good automated system we can actually be a lot looser with genre tags than listentothis is. Unlike reddit, allowing tags like indie, classic rock, alternative, or chill will do no harm here. On listentothis those "not really a genre" genres couldn't be standalone tags. Because Reddit doesn't have tags - so you have to put them in the title of the post, and the bots that check those tags can't alter the title if the submitter uses a disallowed term. But here, we can do it differently. Allow the bot to pull genre tags from an external source and add them to a post. You can keep a user-submitted "chill" or "indie" tag and let the bot worry about adding the real genre tags (electronic, hip hop, whatever). So you get the best of both worlds - the user keeps the tags he/she wanted, and the bot adds correct tags from reliable sources. Imagine how much less frustrating this will be for submitters. We'll have so many fewer stupid arguments over this stuff! We can still standardize certain terms, (change alternative to alt rock, for example) but we can still keep terms that aren't real genres or styles but still have come into common usage.
You did a great job of explaining exactly why the automated system here will be so much more user friendly than our bots on /r/listentothis and /r/music -- the strict title format there being both...
You did a great job of explaining exactly why the automated system here will be so much more user friendly than our bots on /r/listentothis and /r/music -- the strict title format there being both a necessity to obtain metadata from a submission, and at the same time supremely user unfriendly (which leads into higher mod-loads fixing trivial mistakes again, and again, and...) -- so I don't have much else to say!
I'm a tagmod, so I can help with that until we have a more sophisticated system. Agree with @arghdos though - it has to be automated to function at scale.
I'm a tagmod, so I can help with that until we have a more sophisticated system. Agree with @arghdos though - it has to be automated to function at scale.
I really struggle with tagging/classifying. I generally classify into "I like this" and "I don't like this" on a sliding scale. I enjoy Subhead and I also enjoy Shostakovich and I get slightly...
I really struggle with tagging/classifying.
I generally classify into "I like this" and "I don't like this" on a sliding scale. I enjoy Subhead and I also enjoy Shostakovich and I get slightly frustrated by the need to put everything in its own little niche.
I get very annoyed if I say "I like this, it's kind of country with an edge" and someone comes in to musicsplain to me that it's akshully DoomBilly CountryCore with elements of BluegrassMetal running through it. Drives me nuts.
There's just too many subgenres. There must be ten or more "styles" of techno and house, never mind trying to find the line between techno and techfunk, or techno and tech house, house and tech house or bass house etc etc. When is something Drum and Bass, or jungle or neurojungle or liquid drum and bass?
And as for classifying the gajillion subgenres of metal, I have no idea where to start with that. And so many names for pop music. What gets lumped together as "indie" is what I consider pop, as well as vast amounts of R'n'B (which isn't what I consider R'n'B in any way, shape or form).
I'm not going to be precious about anyone changing any of the tags I use though, because sometimes other people will know what I don't.
In the short term, I think that might have to be the price to pay for having decent usable tags. Doing things right always invites conflict about what "right" is. Of course, I imagine most cases...
In the short term, I think that might have to be the price to pay for having decent usable tags. Doing things right always invites conflict about what "right" is. Of course, I imagine most cases where that would go too far would also violate civility rules and be deleted anyway.
In the long term, if the seemingly popular ideas about automated tagging come into play, that could be almost entirely eliminated.
Imo the absolute ideal is to use hierarchical tags, since ~music might have the most to gain there. The big question in my mind is where we pull those from, since individuals trying to tag along...
Imo the absolute ideal is to use hierarchical tags, since ~music might have the most to gain there.
The big question in my mind is where we pull those from, since individuals trying to tag along with their own idea of what the hierarchy should be would be even worse than what we have now. What projects should we use as a model? Should we directly pull from another attempt to organize music genres like this? Should we make our own?
I don't know, but we really should toss these ideas around and at least all be doing the same thing, even if it's sub-optimal.
Hmm, so I had assumed they did, but I appear to be wrong. Here's at least one (graphical) hierarchy for us to get started with. Note that we have the advantage of allowing multiple tags (or roots)...
Hmm, so I had assumed they did, but I appear to be wrong.
Be careful with Discogs. All the info there is user submitted. And as a very active submitter and editor there, I can tell you that the genre and style tags are often laughably wrong.
Be careful with Discogs. All the info there is user submitted. And as a very active submitter and editor there, I can tell you that the genre and style tags are often laughably wrong.
Good point, I almost invariably use discogs as my primary source for looking up specific releases (differentiating between CD / Vinyl / Cassette rips), artist/production credits, etc., it tends to...
Good point, I almost invariably use discogs as my primary source for looking up specific releases (differentiating between CD / Vinyl / Cassette rips), artist/production credits, etc., it tends to be a bit more complete than MB for that type of stuff. I haven't paid a huge amount of attention to the genre tags in particular, but as long as they're in the right ballpark that's a start -- we can always cross-check them with MB or some other datasource. Pretty much any open-source (or at least, user-editable) music database will have some flaws.
Another interesting idea is that once we get a good enough tagging system in place, we might even consider contributing fixes upstream back to these databases to improve their accuracy.
I couldn't say if it's better or worse, but I do know that Discogs guidelines don't consider Wikipedia to be a reliable source of data, for whatever that's worth. But I spend a lot of time making...
I couldn't say if it's better or worse, but I do know that Discogs guidelines don't consider Wikipedia to be a reliable source of data, for whatever that's worth. But I spend a lot of time making corrections on Discogs (it's a good hobby for me) and the number of errors I find in the data is astounding. The voting and peer review systems on the site are not nearly adequate for the number of releases that are submitted. Obviously I'm biased because I spend so much time on it, but I wouldn't rely solely on their data. Maybe we could figure out a way to cross-reference it against another database and if the two are in agreement we could then apply the genre tag here.
I liken it to the problem of finding music that the English speaking internet doesn't think exists... If it's not especially difficult for me to find tracks or artists that Discogs knows nothing...
I liken it to the problem of finding music that the English speaking internet doesn't think exists... If it's not especially difficult for me to find tracks or artists that Discogs knows nothing about (or next to), then I imagine there are more artists / albums for which data exists, but is shoddy or incomplete.
Ok, so I've done some digging this morning -- there doesn't appear to be a serious effort at hierarchical music genre classification existent on the internet. This leads me to believe that it's...
Ok, so I've done some digging this morning -- there doesn't appear to be a serious effort at hierarchical music genre classification existent on the internet. This leads me to believe that it's likely very difficult to come up with anything coherent (particularly for a tree-structure with single inheritance), however:
Possibly we could have sub-groups belong to multiple owning groups (or at least, have the ability to bubble up into both?) e.g., Jazz-Fusion would be a child of Jazz and Rock. This would eliminate a lot of issues in trying to decide "X genre should be a child of Y overarching genre" at the expense of (possibly very significant) backend complexity.
The hierarchy on Tildes won't be 'fixed' (or at least, practically speaking, not for some time to come). This means iterative refinement! Hooray for iterative processes!
We are likely best served (at the moment) by determining a list of 'root' genres, here at least there are some existing options. Bliss has a good discussion of these, and collects several from Discogs, FreeDB, Wiki, Allmusic, etc.
We might even decide that tagging with one (or more) of these root genres is sufficient, and genre tags above and beyond too much hassle.
While it's tailored to the specific needs of the site and there's not yet a proper api for it, rateyourmusic.com has a hierarchical genre tag system which also supports multiple tags on the same...
While it's tailored to the specific needs of the site and there's not yet a proper api for it, rateyourmusic.com has a hierarchical genre tag system which also supports multiple tags on the same release that might be worth taking a look at. While it certainly has big flaws, it might be a good starting point or point of reference. Like, the top-level genres on that site are a bit of a mess (punk isn't rock music?), but determining what is a child of what could definitely be helped along with that in mind.
Do you have any ideas for how we could actually get something together beyond just throwing out ideas into a void? Collaboratively getting together a specific plan and making another post to see what others think seems like the way to go, and that's hard to accomplish with just a thread like this.
So that's interesting -- that hierarchy definitely seems to fit the bill (at least, as a starting point), too bad they don't have an API yet (and the ticket has been open for 9 years, so... maybe...
So that's interesting -- that hierarchy definitely seems to fit the bill (at least, as a starting point), too bad they don't have an API yet (and the ticket has been open for 9 years, so... maybe never?).
Do you have any ideas for how we could actually get something together beyond just throwing out ideas into a void? Collaboratively getting together a specific plan and making another post to see what others think seems like the way to go, and that's hard to accomplish with just a thread like this.
I think we should make another post on the possibilities for a list of top-level genres (combing from the lists given in the bliss page and RYM, take everyone's feedback, refine the list (as needed) and put it up to a vote; if we agree, the tag-mods on this sub can start enforcing at least the top-level genre specification. This brings up a few more interesting questions: can we put in place rules (or at least, text in the side-bar clarifying this?), do we do an external voting site (e.g., google survey?) or just count comment votes?
They have said that it's a high priority feature after the new site launches (they're doing a huge overhaul and changing the name to Sonemic which is entering the final stage of its beta), so I...
too bad they don't have an API yet (and the ticket has been open for 9 years, so... maybe never?)
They have said that it's a high priority feature after the new site launches (they're doing a huge overhaul and changing the name to Sonemic which is entering the final stage of its beta), so I actually believe them on it happening, but that doesn't mean it's on a timescale that's useful for us.
Anyway, I agree about the way to go. Do you want to make that post, or do you not want to? As for if it can get to the point where it's on a sidebar or something, I imagine @Deimos has some feelings on how it should be beyond whatever the rest of us want (or how this should go at all), so...I guess that's a worthwhile ping.
I'm pretty sure it was in response to putting tagging guidelines (or more generally speaking, group rules) on the sidebar, and what might be a good process by which we could bring them to you...
I'm pretty sure it was in response to putting tagging guidelines (or more generally speaking, group rules) on the sidebar, and what might be a good process by which we could bring them to you (e.g., hold a vote in a thread?).
@Whom, I'm happy to make the post tomorrow, I need a bit more time to recover from today :p
Hierarchy like rock.indie, rock.alternative, latin.folk, for genre. That way everything gets group together and you can narrow it down based on the subgroups
Hierarchy like rock.indie, rock.alternative, latin.folk, for genre. That way everything gets group together and you can narrow it down based on the subgroups
I'm terrible at tagging. I'm unlikely to use most of the tags. I might use tags if they were suggested to me as I type. I'm happy for other people to tag my posts, if they feel tags are important....
I'm terrible at tagging. I'm unlikely to use most of the tags. I might use tags if they were suggested to me as I type. I'm happy for other people to tag my posts, if they feel tags are important.
I think it's important to avoid too much gatekeeping over tags. You're going to exclude people, and stop them posting useful interesting content just because they can't keep up with a bewildering array of tags? Because they don't know whether this song is rock.indie, rock.indierock, or indie.rock? That's sub-optimal.
And let's not pretend that the genre actually means anything or gives users any useful information.
Genre labels are also often socially driven with little to do with the actual characteristics of the music. They are labels stamped onto artists and albums by record companies with the intent of targeting a particularly type of audience or age group.
The fundamental problem is that genre labels often do not accurately describe artists and their music – they simply do not do them justice. A more accurate way to label music would be based solely on their actual musical characteristics (or attributes). Such a labelling system would also likely better account for diversity in a person’s music taste.
The work of Mörchen, Ultsch, Thies, Löhken, Nöcker, Stamm, Efthymiou & Kümmerer (2005) analysed and visualised timbre similarities of sound within a music collection. They argue there are many problems with genre classification:
The problem with this approach is the subjectivity and ambiguity of the categorization used for training and validation [Aucouturier and Pachet, 2003]. Often genres don’t even correspond to the sound of the music but to the time and place where the music came up or the culture of the musicians creating it. Some authors try to explain the low performance of their classi_cation methods by the fuzzy and overlapping nature of genres [Tzanetakis and Cook, 2002]. An analysis of musical similarity showed bad correspondence with genres, again explained by their inconsistency and ambiguity [Pampalk et al., 2003b].
I hadn't envisioned including the artist name as a tag. I mean, you've already got it in the title of the post, so why duplicate it? Once the search function is fully working you can do a search...
I hadn't envisioned including the artist name as a tag. I mean, you've already got it in the title of the post, so why duplicate it? Once the search function is fully working you can do a search for the artist's name if you really want to see every submission by that artist.
I would really like to see genres and possibly year of release as tags. In time it's possible that we could have bots to scrape that information from other online databases and apply the tags automatically. I'm sure @amarok will have something to say about that.
I don't think it'll be super useful right now, but I imagine in the future if we are able to define specific named tags such as "artist: Shakey Graves", it would make automating anything dealing...
I don't think it'll be super useful right now, but I imagine in the future if we are able to define specific named tags such as "artist: Shakey Graves", it would make automating anything dealing with artist / song information far easier.
Another use case would be for tagging news articles that don't necessarily include the artist name in their title, but would still be of interest for someone searching for the artist.
Oooh, you're right. I forgot all about news articles. And @dubteedub makes a good point about tags being ready now, while search is not. I guess including artist names in tags has more upsides...
Another use case would be for tagging news articles that don't necessarily include the artist name in their title, but would still be of interest for someone searching for the artist.
Oooh, you're right. I forgot all about news articles. And @dubteedub makes a good point about tags being ready now, while search is not. I guess including artist names in tags has more upsides than downsides. But I don't think posts should be removed if the submitter forgets or declines to include an artist tag. Mods or bots should just add it after the fact.
I hadn't considered tagging the artist, but I think it makes a lot of sense. It's like a one-click tildes album for that artist then. I think hierarchical tags make a lot of sense once you get...
I hadn't considered tagging the artist, but I think it makes a lot of sense. It's like a one-click tildes album for that artist then.
I think hierarchical tags make a lot of sense once you get into them.
I don't think a tildes classification system has to be perfect though; it's just to help discovery. I think some people might go super crazy with hierarchy, but that's a-ok as long as the...
I don't think a tildes classification system has to be perfect though; it's just to help discovery.
I think some people might go super crazy with hierarchy, but that's a-ok as long as the hierarchy makes sense and you're not classifying Chopin as rock.progressive.soft.piano or something. Anything more then two levels deep will probably just get ignored by 99% of people, but I think the first level is easily graspable and something that most people can deal with.
Ok, so having been at the front lines of the "indie" genre-war for the past several years, I can very confidently say that:
A couple other thoughts (I will likely have many more tomorrow):
I think this is important for us to remember, and it's a nice example of how we can make management of ~music different from /r/listentothis. If we implement a good automated system we can actually be a lot looser with genre tags than listentothis is. Unlike reddit, allowing tags like indie, classic rock, alternative, or chill will do no harm here. On listentothis those "not really a genre" genres couldn't be standalone tags. Because Reddit doesn't have tags - so you have to put them in the title of the post, and the bots that check those tags can't alter the title if the submitter uses a disallowed term. But here, we can do it differently. Allow the bot to pull genre tags from an external source and add them to a post. You can keep a user-submitted "chill" or "indie" tag and let the bot worry about adding the real genre tags (electronic, hip hop, whatever). So you get the best of both worlds - the user keeps the tags he/she wanted, and the bot adds correct tags from reliable sources. Imagine how much less frustrating this will be for submitters. We'll have so many fewer stupid arguments over this stuff! We can still standardize certain terms, (change alternative to alt rock, for example) but we can still keep terms that aren't real genres or styles but still have come into common usage.
You did a great job of explaining exactly why the automated system here will be so much more user friendly than our bots on /r/listentothis and /r/music -- the strict title format there being both a necessity to obtain metadata from a submission, and at the same time supremely user unfriendly (which leads into higher mod-loads fixing trivial mistakes again, and again, and...) -- so I don't have much else to say!
Woah, I had never thought of it from that perspective. That sounds heavenly for everyone involved.
Agreed, having a standardized tagging structure is the most critical step now (and makes adoption of future automatic tagging that much easier)
I'm a tagmod, so I can help with that until we have a more sophisticated system. Agree with @arghdos though - it has to be automated to function at scale.
I really struggle with tagging/classifying.
I generally classify into "I like this" and "I don't like this" on a sliding scale. I enjoy Subhead and I also enjoy Shostakovich and I get slightly frustrated by the need to put everything in its own little niche.
I get very annoyed if I say "I like this, it's kind of country with an edge" and someone comes in to musicsplain to me that it's akshully DoomBilly CountryCore with elements of BluegrassMetal running through it. Drives me nuts.
There's just too many subgenres. There must be ten or more "styles" of techno and house, never mind trying to find the line between techno and techfunk, or techno and tech house, house and tech house or bass house etc etc. When is something Drum and Bass, or jungle or neurojungle or liquid drum and bass?
And as for classifying the gajillion subgenres of metal, I have no idea where to start with that. And so many names for pop music. What gets lumped together as "indie" is what I consider pop, as well as vast amounts of R'n'B (which isn't what I consider R'n'B in any way, shape or form).
I'm not going to be precious about anyone changing any of the tags I use though, because sometimes other people will know what I don't.
I foresee tag wars.
In the short term, I think that might have to be the price to pay for having decent usable tags. Doing things right always invites conflict about what "right" is. Of course, I imagine most cases where that would go too far would also violate civility rules and be deleted anyway.
In the long term, if the seemingly popular ideas about automated tagging come into play, that could be almost entirely eliminated.
Imo the absolute ideal is to use hierarchical tags, since ~music might have the most to gain there.
The big question in my mind is where we pull those from, since individuals trying to tag along with their own idea of what the hierarchy should be would be even worse than what we have now. What projects should we use as a model? Should we directly pull from another attempt to organize music genres like this? Should we make our own?
I don't know, but we really should toss these ideas around and at least all be doing the same thing, even if it's sub-optimal.
I would consider MusicBrainz or Discogs the gold standard for music metadata.
I pull from MusicBrainz for my own personal tags, but I didn't realize they had any type of hierarchy set up. Where exactly is that located?
Hmm, so I had assumed they did, but I appear to be wrong.
Here's at least one (graphical) hierarchy for us to get started with. Note that we have the advantage of allowing multiple tags (or roots) of the hierarchy, so for instance a funky Eddie Henderson track could be listed under ~jazz.fusion and ~funk (rather than ~jazz.fusion.funk or something equally cumbersome)
I have to go hunting for some more genre hierarchies tomorrow!
Be careful with Discogs. All the info there is user submitted. And as a very active submitter and editor there, I can tell you that the genre and style tags are often laughably wrong.
Good point, I almost invariably use discogs as my primary source for looking up specific releases (differentiating between CD / Vinyl / Cassette rips), artist/production credits, etc., it tends to be a bit more complete than MB for that type of stuff. I haven't paid a huge amount of attention to the genre tags in particular, but as long as they're in the right ballpark that's a start -- we can always cross-check them with MB or some other datasource. Pretty much any open-source (or at least, user-editable) music database will have some flaws.
Another interesting idea is that once we get a good enough tagging system in place, we might even consider contributing fixes upstream back to these databases to improve their accuracy.
I couldn't say if it's better or worse, but I do know that Discogs guidelines don't consider Wikipedia to be a reliable source of data, for whatever that's worth. But I spend a lot of time making corrections on Discogs (it's a good hobby for me) and the number of errors I find in the data is astounding. The voting and peer review systems on the site are not nearly adequate for the number of releases that are submitted. Obviously I'm biased because I spend so much time on it, but I wouldn't rely solely on their data. Maybe we could figure out a way to cross-reference it against another database and if the two are in agreement we could then apply the genre tag here.
I liken it to the problem of finding music that the English speaking internet doesn't think exists... If it's not especially difficult for me to find tracks or artists that Discogs knows nothing about (or next to), then I imagine there are more artists / albums for which data exists, but is shoddy or incomplete.
Parent.Child
Ok, so I've done some digging this morning -- there doesn't appear to be a serious effort at hierarchical music genre classification existent on the internet. This leads me to believe that it's likely very difficult to come up with anything coherent (particularly for a tree-structure with single inheritance), however:
A file-structure like genre tree is likely a bad idea, but submissions on Tildes can have multiple genre tags, and, at least theoretically, can be x-posted to multiple groups corresponding to these tags.
Possibly we could have sub-groups belong to multiple owning groups (or at least, have the ability to bubble up into both?) e.g., Jazz-Fusion would be a child of Jazz and Rock. This would eliminate a lot of issues in trying to decide "X genre should be a child of Y overarching genre" at the expense of (possibly very significant) backend complexity.
The hierarchy on Tildes won't be 'fixed' (or at least, practically speaking, not for some time to come). This means iterative refinement! Hooray for iterative processes!
We are likely best served (at the moment) by determining a list of 'root' genres, here at least there are some existing options. Bliss has a good discussion of these, and collects several from Discogs, FreeDB, Wiki, Allmusic, etc.
We might even decide that tagging with one (or more) of these root genres is sufficient, and genre tags above and beyond too much hassle.
The MusicBrainz schema does not support genre! There are a few plugins one could use to work around this however.
Some more genre classifications: Library of Congress, wikidata
While it's tailored to the specific needs of the site and there's not yet a proper api for it, rateyourmusic.com has a hierarchical genre tag system which also supports multiple tags on the same release that might be worth taking a look at. While it certainly has big flaws, it might be a good starting point or point of reference. Like, the top-level genres on that site are a bit of a mess (punk isn't rock music?), but determining what is a child of what could definitely be helped along with that in mind.
Do you have any ideas for how we could actually get something together beyond just throwing out ideas into a void? Collaboratively getting together a specific plan and making another post to see what others think seems like the way to go, and that's hard to accomplish with just a thread like this.
So that's interesting -- that hierarchy definitely seems to fit the bill (at least, as a starting point), too bad they don't have an API yet (and the ticket has been open for 9 years, so... maybe never?).
I think we should make another post on the possibilities for a list of top-level genres (combing from the lists given in the bliss page and RYM, take everyone's feedback, refine the list (as needed) and put it up to a vote; if we agree, the tag-mods on this sub can start enforcing at least the top-level genre specification. This brings up a few more interesting questions: can we put in place rules (or at least, text in the side-bar clarifying this?), do we do an external voting site (e.g., google survey?) or just count comment votes?
They have said that it's a high priority feature after the new site launches (they're doing a huge overhaul and changing the name to Sonemic which is entering the final stage of its beta), so I actually believe them on it happening, but that doesn't mean it's on a timescale that's useful for us.
Anyway, I agree about the way to go. Do you want to make that post, or do you not want to? As for if it can get to the point where it's on a sidebar or something, I imagine @Deimos has some feelings on how it should be beyond whatever the rest of us want (or how this should go at all), so...I guess that's a worthwhile ping.
Sorry, what exactly were you wondering about my opinion on? Putting tagging guidelines somewhere, or integrating external data? (Or something else?)
I'm pretty sure it was in response to putting tagging guidelines (or more generally speaking, group rules) on the sidebar, and what might be a good process by which we could bring them to you (e.g., hold a vote in a thread?).
@Whom, I'm happy to make the post tomorrow, I need a bit more time to recover from today :p
Hierarchy like rock.indie, rock.alternative, latin.folk, for genre. That way everything gets group together and you can narrow it down based on the subgroups
I'm terrible at tagging. I'm unlikely to use most of the tags. I might use tags if they were suggested to me as I type. I'm happy for other people to tag my posts, if they feel tags are important.
I think it's important to avoid too much gatekeeping over tags. You're going to exclude people, and stop them posting useful interesting content just because they can't keep up with a bewildering array of tags? Because they don't know whether this song is rock.indie, rock.indierock, or indie.rock? That's sub-optimal.
And let's not pretend that the genre actually means anything or gives users any useful information.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/opinion-musical-genres-are-out-of-date-but-this-new-system-explains-why-you-might-like-both-jazz-and
https://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2011/04/26/visualising-music-the-problems-with-genre-classification/
I hadn't envisioned including the artist name as a tag. I mean, you've already got it in the title of the post, so why duplicate it? Once the search function is fully working you can do a search for the artist's name if you really want to see every submission by that artist.
I would really like to see genres and possibly year of release as tags. In time it's possible that we could have bots to scrape that information from other online databases and apply the tags automatically. I'm sure @amarok will have something to say about that.
I don't think it'll be super useful right now, but I imagine in the future if we are able to define specific named tags such as "artist: Shakey Graves", it would make automating anything dealing with artist / song information far easier.
Another use case would be for tagging news articles that don't necessarily include the artist name in their title, but would still be of interest for someone searching for the artist.
Oooh, you're right. I forgot all about news articles. And @dubteedub makes a good point about tags being ready now, while search is not. I guess including artist names in tags has more upsides than downsides. But I don't think posts should be removed if the submitter forgets or declines to include an artist tag. Mods or bots should just add it after the fact.
I hadn't considered tagging the artist, but I think it makes a lot of sense. It's like a one-click tildes album for that artist then.
I think hierarchical tags make a lot of sense once you get into them.
I don't think a tildes classification system has to be perfect though; it's just to help discovery.
I think some people might go super crazy with hierarchy, but that's a-ok as long as the hierarchy makes sense and you're not classifying Chopin as
rock.progressive.soft.pianoor something. Anything more then two levels deep will probably just get ignored by 99% of people, but I think the first level is easily graspable and something that most people can deal with.