[mb-devel] Collaborative Filtering: Artist - Artist Relationships

[Bogdan Butnaru]

> > MusicBrainz does not have any information about genres (or custom
> > tagging), ratings, comments (or discussions about artists/releases),
> > and only has a very basic subscription tool right now.  I am just
> > commenting to say that I would love to be able to:
> > * comment on artists/releases,
> > * rate albums/songs,
>
> I have been dreaming of this for a long time too. I believe this would
> give new aspect to MB, which is currently purely technical.

I think that's the wrong way of doing it. MusicBrainz currently is
trying (and succeeding reasonably well, in my opinion) to catalogue
the objective aspects of music. It's not perfect, and it needs a lot
more effort, but it's _focused_ on as much objectivity as is possible.

I think entering the subjective area (genres, ratings, comments) would
be detrimental, because it would dilute the focus. It is better, I
think, that MusicBrainz retains its objective focus, and a separate
project would handle the subjective aspect, using the MusicBrainz data
through the web service (or a more direct link) to anchor user input.

Actually, the ideal case would be IMO something like last.fm, but
using the MB data. (This would get rid of same-titled bands getting
mixed up as it happens now on last.fm.) Perhaps an open variant of
last.fm could be created (though the for-profit version has the
advantage of being able to actually stream music); the whole point is
to have someone else than the already-overworked MusicBrainz
developers care about the difficult problem of handling very complex
subjective data (instead of having one title that all users agree on,
after a vote or a few, it'll have to maintain a rating for each user
that ever listened to the track). Doing all this within MB would
complicate things enormously and muddy every decision we'll have to
take from now on.

-- 
Bogdan Butnaru — bogdanb at gmail.com
"I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.