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Comment by jiveturkey | Hacker News Reader

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jiveturkey

> on account of being long-deceased and all

posthumous releases are a thing

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You know you're right

You win the internet

Ok, this is epic

Not really for the likes of Fanny Mendelssohn.

Fanny Mendelssohn was personally involved in roughly 0% of the recordings that come up on Spotify when you search for her name, but I'd bet any fan of hers would be OK being recommended most of those recordings, or most any new ones that came out using her as a search term.

Classical music categorization (where the composer of the music is often of more interest than the performer) is very difficult to reconcile with pop music (where the opposite is more likely to be true).

This is incorrect, but it's principally incorrect because we all abuse the artist field to contain composer information. This is done, I surmise, because figuring out when to display the composer information (performances of composed works) and when not to (bands) is too hard while delivering consistent UX.

It could be as simple as another piece of metadata on the track.

And on the file level, it is! But then do you as a music player / streaming service display that all the time, when most people are not listening to classical music and do not care about the composer? Do you make the user manage which columns are visible? (Almost every HN user misses when more software did this. Almost every normal user found it confusing/annoying.) What about publishers who do not give a damn that Johann Sebastian Bach did not perform this digital recording because they know it'll SEO way better to have him in the artist field? Now are you displaying all that inconsistency?

I don't mean "add composer to the metadata", I mean add a field "primary artist key" which could have the value "composer", "performer", etc.

How many fields are displayed is up to the UI, but having metadata to indicate what the most sensible field is would allow a simple UI like Spotify to just show that by default.

Specifying on an individual level avoids trying to lump together genres and categorize which field matters most for each.

Isn't it principally an industry thing to hide the composer, they don't want us to know that the pop is from a "factory" and picked for the artist, they want the public to believe the myth that the manufactured band sit on mountaintops with their instruments coming up with new grooves (or whatever).

Can't you just let the user decide "artist + track" or "artist + composer(s) + track" or ...

That's their point though, it's not the same across musical industries.

Pop music? Yeah people don't care about the composer credits.

Classical music or a jazz standards band? You want the performing artist and the composer.

I was trying to express the idea that it was pop industry who made the decision that composers didn't matter rather than pop consumers and maybe that given the information pop listeners might well be happy to know where the pop comes from.

That would be work for the label. Most of them won't DO the w word.

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