Decibel: Music Metadata On Steroids
Could More Info Mean More Music Discovery?
Remember pouring over album liner notes to learn who played that great sax solo on the new Stones album? OK maybe you're too young for that, but there have probably been times when you wanted to learn more about the track you were listening to.
New startup Decibel trys to solve that problem by replacing the usual title, album cover art, artist name, and track length with 150 fields of metadata including things like bacgkorund singers, genre, and production assistants. With the data Decibel can also offer sophisticated music discovery service that relating tracks "three dimensionally" rather than just by artist, genre or beats.
Powering the next generation of digital music from Decibel on Vimeo.
The idea sounds great, currently I stuff info about session players into the comments field of MP3s like Artist Name (Instrument), Artist Name (Instruments), etc.
Composer field gets production credits usually. if it is a cover ill denote that in the track title instead of the composers writing credits.
Yeah…
Allmusic.com has been keeping a database containing that kind of data for decades, but unfortunately, they have been rather lax in updating it over at least the last 2 years. They have been a valuable source of information and a great help in music discovery for me. I haven’t got an idea on why they don’t update as much info anymore. Maybe they don’t get the metadata anymore with the promo releases they get. But I have noticed that I have bought less new albums as a result of them not posting as much metadata as before.
I’m all for more metadata.