[mb-users] "The need for free and open music metadata", but MB not good enough

[Frederic Da Vitoria]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 11:32 AM, mudcrow <mudcrow at googlemail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 9:38 AM, Jim DeLaHunt <from.nabble at jdlh.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > I'm back at MusicBrainz after a couple of months paying attention to
> > other
> > projects. (Amazing, the mb-style list didn't clean up all the rest of
> > the
> > CSG while I was away. I still get to play.)
> >
> > I found an interesting blog post by a music web entrepreneur here in
> > Vancouver, David Gratton.
> >
> > "The need for free and open music metadata" (February 19, 2008)
> > <
> > http://www.davidrdgratton.com/blog/the-need-for-free-and-open-music-metadata
> > >
> > "Non-profits are simply the stable entity for offering metadata, whereas
> > private companies will be inherently unstable. Music metadata is factual
> > content about known items. As such the cost of acquisition of this data
> > is
> > quite low and falling. The price of metadata, like that of music will
> > approach 'near free'."
> >
> > Very validating for those of us contributing to MusicBrainz.
> >
> > But read on: "Why didn't Music Brainz make it as the default service?
> > It was staffed by wonderful, incredibly smart, and committed people who
> > understand the need for a free and open metadata service. However, in my
> > opinion Music Brainz is simply way to complex, tedious, and time
> > consuming
> > to update. Wikipedia on the other hand is dead simple. End of story.
> > However, the Music Brainz still has a lot to offer as we discovered."
>
>
> But musicbrainz is a database, not bloody wikipedia, and I bloody hate
> bloody wikipedia.
>
> Interesting that he lists among the cons of musicbrainz "incomplete and
> inaccurate content" while for the pros of wikipedia "in depth and highly
> accurate data". I guess he hasn't looked at many album entries at wikipedia.
>
> And why has he compared musicbrainz to allmusic, wikipedia and
> audioscrobbler (?!?), maybe he should look at other music databases to
> compare ease of use such as discogs or rateyourmusic.
> Music data is based on simple facts, you have a track list, you have
> musicians, there's not much room for opinionated wiki glorification.
>
>
> Sounds like another wiki lover who thinks everything should be wikified,
> blind to the fact that wikipedia is full of inaccurate, unchecked info and
> trawled by wankers who delight in deleting anything and everything they deem
> to be not notable enough.
>
> But I'm biased as I'm proud to be a wiki hater.
> Mud
>
>
> >
> > Hence, he intends to make his own: "So to solve this problem we have
> > taken
> > Wikipedia and joined it to Music Brainz to get structured Wikipedia
> > music
> > metadata. That's cool and useful. At least we think it is. We will be
> > offering it as a free 'for commercial use' Web service in a few
> > months...."
> >
> > David Gratton is a thoughtful guy. After I met him, I added his blog to
> > my
> > daily reading list.  I like what he's trying to do with his Project
> > Opus.
> > Thus I was disappointed to hear that he thought the way ahead was to
> > make
> > something different from MusicBrainz instead of contributing to
> > MusicBrainz
> > itself. It made me stop and think about what it is about MusicBrainz
> > that
> > causes him to write it off as "way [too] complex, tedious, and time
> > consuming to update".
> >
> > One of my ambitions is to make MusicBrainz a little simpler, easier, and
> > faster to update.
>
>
>
> Good luck with that.
>

I am not a  wiki hater or lover, I believe wikis have their uses. They are
useful for data which is not easily modeled. We are experiencing some
difficulties in modeling musical metadata, but I believe these problems come
essentially from defining and gathering the data we want to store. Although
I don't hate wikis (wikipedia is not perfect, but it is useful, provided you
know it's drawbacks) I agree a wiki does not seem appropriate.

As mudcrow said, a wiki is too open.

A wiki is unstructured. It is difficult to do complex searches with a wiki.
A database is made to offer such queries to the user.

So although I agree MB should try to become more user-friendly, I believe
that this should not be done at the expense of reliability or richness.

After checking David Gratton's blog, I believe his remarks come from the
fact he is looking for kinds of data which are not in MB and maybe never
will. The first sentences of the Pink Floyd wikipedia page show what I mean:
I don't think they would belong in MB, their place is in wikipedia. MB is a
database with the drawbacks and the advantages of a database. I suggest we
should continue to work for a better faster and more user-friendly database,
not a wiki. Let wikipedia take care of that aspect of things.

-- 
Frederic Da Vitoria
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