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

[Robert Kaye]

On Apr 26, 2008, at 1:38 AM, Jim DeLaHunt wrote:

> 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".


I spoke with him at the San Fran Music Tech summit in February and we  
discussed this very issue for quite some time.

In short I think David is not fully grasping the complexity of music  
metadata or the complexity of building a community that can work on  
music metadata. In essence, if I understood right, he is very much  
interested in building a system that resembles MusicBrainz in its  
first year. Very simple and probably quite suited for simple data  
entry for simple music like pop music.

But we all know that music consists of bland things like pop music and  
amazingly complex music like classical. And for this wide variety of  
music you have a continuum of music metadata that starts with a simple  
artist/album/track system and reaches all the way to mind-bendingly  
complex pieces with hundreds of performers.

Where do you draw the line? Some people will want to keep things  
simple (KISS, of course!) and others will want to capture every nuance  
of the music. Where do you make the cut and tell the every-detail  
people to go shove it?

I thought that after talking to David that he was short on a few things:

- Short on research: His original blog post failed to discover lots of  
obvious things about MB.
- Short on time: He gave himself two months to get to a working  
system. In comparison, MB took 4 years to become useful. 6 before we  
had a paying customer.
- Short on anticipating the complexity of this problem. Music metadata  
is horribly complex and bootstrapping a community isn't a walk in the  
park either.

Jim: I'm glad you're back and eager to make MB simpler. yay!

--

--ruaok      Somewhere in Texas a village is *still* missing its idiot.

Robert Kaye     --     rob at eorbit.net     --    http://mayhem-chaos.net