3 ms·

A funny edge case I've found in one of the most popular music services (Last.fm). There is an instrumental post-rock ish band called Collections of Colonies of

A funny edge case I've found in one of the most popular music services (Last.fm). There is an instrumental post-rock ish band called Collections of Colonies of Bees and they have an album where almost all the tracks have the same name; they are all titled "Fun" except for the last track titled "Funeral". https://open.spotify.com/album/0LP8DTy4amlLIVXGOjvCo2?si=HJ3ntxqARDWvpVmyNK_ZlQ https://open.spotify.com/album/0LP8DTy4amlLIVXGOjvCo2?si=HJ3... This has caused last.fm to think "Fun" is one of my most played songs of the year even though they were all separate tracks.

aasasd 5y ago
I bet the most popular track name in techno is “Untitled”.
- mehrzad 5y ago
  I would guess that the problem only appears if it's the same artist and same album ID. Not sure if techno artists use "Untitled" multiple times on the same album, haha.
  - aasasd 5y ago
    Oh, easily—whole careers are probably made of ‘untitled’ tracks. Afaik, in edm a more common identifier for such unnamed records and tracks is the catalog number and track number or the side (for a single). Here's one of the best albums by Hype Williams the duo: https://www.discogs.com/master/337242-Hype-Williams-Untitled https://www.discogs.com/master/337242-Hype-Williams-Untitled (not edm but still).
- zimmund 5y ago
  Last.fm doesn't allow "untitled", "various artists", "track 01" and other titles that may suggest the song is incorrectly tagged. This leads, of course, to edge cases where an artist has a track named "untitled" and it can't be scrobbled. Moreover, last.fm also has an issue with unicode characters and some artists/albums may have two or more different profiles. It's a mess!
  - aasasd 5y ago
    I actually was more traumatized when I discovered that artists with the same name are filed under the same ‘profile’, and just have a textual explanation that they are actually different. You'd think that a service purporting to do ‘big data’ processing could grab discographies off Discogs or something, and compare the album titles. Anyway, personally I long since abandoned Last.fm in favor of more hands-on discovery.

aasasd 5y ago

I bet the most popular track name in techno is “Untitled”.

mehrzad 5y ago
I would guess that the problem only appears if it's the same artist and same album ID. Not sure if techno artists use "Untitled" multiple times on the same album, haha.
- aasasd 5y ago
  Oh, easily—whole careers are probably made of ‘untitled’ tracks. Afaik, in edm a more common identifier for such unnamed records and tracks is the catalog number and track number or the side (for a single). Here's one of the best albums by Hype Williams the duo: https://www.discogs.com/master/337242-Hype-Williams-Untitled https://www.discogs.com/master/337242-Hype-Williams-Untitled (not edm but still).
zimmund 5y ago
Last.fm doesn't allow "untitled", "various artists", "track 01" and other titles that may suggest the song is incorrectly tagged. This leads, of course, to edge cases where an artist has a track named "untitled" and it can't be scrobbled. Moreover, last.fm also has an issue with unicode characters and some artists/albums may have two or more different profiles. It's a mess!
- aasasd 5y ago
  I actually was more traumatized when I discovered that artists with the same name are filed under the same ‘profile’, and just have a textual explanation that they are actually different. You'd think that a service purporting to do ‘big data’ processing could grab discographies off Discogs or something, and compare the album titles. Anyway, personally I long since abandoned Last.fm in favor of more hands-on discovery.