DJ Anubis said on Wednesday, 14 April 2010:
Complained a few times about that too, so I second that... Especially fun if you just waited 20 seconds of ads and than see you can't see what you WANT to see :)

Xanadu said on Wednesday, 14 April 2010:
Could ban that annoying Yahoo! music player for new submissions? It can rarely play a video, because 'the content .. is only available in certain areas'.

Spinks said on Monday, 12 April 2010:
When we designed the subgenre tagging feature we decided to go by track, since in many cases an artist has recorded tracks in several genres. We know it's more work to enter the genre information for each track, but it allows for more granular information. We might add artist-level tagging at some point but don't see it as a high priority feature at the moment.

TheSublimeSupine said on Saturday, 10 April 2010:
Just had another thought too - It would be great if you could tag an artist in a whole sub-genre, so Roni Size is tagged as Jungle, High Contrast as Drum'n'Bass etc... instead of tagging each individual track. I'm sure this one's already on your plate though Spinks.

DJ Anubis said on Thursday, 08 April 2010:
I added 'vs' & 'presents' both as 'Feat'... tbh that to me isn't that important. But to be complete: you also have "with" for some duets... but like I said, you can just as well use "and", but hey, if we want to be right... :)

Spinks said on Wednesday, 07 April 2010:
Yes, good point Xanadu - "Versus" and "Presents" are 2 formats that we currently don't support. They're quite rare and for the time being we just use "and" for "versus" and "feat." for "presents", but it would definitely be good to support them properly at some point.

Xanadu said on Wednesday, 07 April 2010:
While we're at it: it might be nice to able to define the connection between artists on a release. Mashups tend to have versus or vs. between 2 artist names (e.g. "LMC vs. U2 - Take Me To The Clouds Above") and new artists are sometimes presented by a well known name such as "Benny Benassi presents The Biz - Satisfaction". There might be other exceptions I am forgetting.

Spinks said on Wednesday, 07 April 2010:
Yep, it's a good idea indeed. We can add it in a similar way to how we did with the producer info. Another one for the to-do list, we'll get there eventually, cheers! :)

KingRizlaa said on Wednesday, 07 April 2010:
Spinks, what about the composer / song writer links? Sounds like a good idea.

Spinks said on Tuesday, 06 April 2010:
Hi guys, we're indeed planning to add "member of" and "aka" features to artist pages, so that members of a group will be linked up to it. For the time being we're always trying to assess whether an artist name which is composed of 2 (or more) parties merits a separate listing by judging the strength of that connection. For example, "Sonny & Cher" had a long stretch of releasing records together, so it's a "group name" with a listing of its own. When a track is by two artists that collaborated for no more than a couple of records, the listing is separate and the artists will be listed as collaborators. When we'll have the "member of" and "aka" features, we'll probably set straight a few artists in the database, such as Bob Marley & the Wailers.

TheSublimeSupine said on Tuesday, 06 April 2010:
I see it like this - Sonny & Cher are one group. Sonny Bono is an individual artist. Cher is an individual artist. But the songs listed above were performed under the group title Sonny & Cher... they didn't play the drums on the songs, they were just the singers. Would we then track down the backing band to add them as artists too ?

Put it this way, you wouldn't list them separately if the two of them formed a group called "The Freaky Lookin' Couple" would you ? You'd just refer to them as the latter.

Xanadu said on Tuesday, 06 April 2010:
"Sonny & Cher" are 2 singers, Cher has released work on her own. Same with Bob Marley and the Wailers, for example. "Kool & The Gang" is a band name, not 2 seperate artists. I think a feature to list members of a group could be useful. I am also missing a feature to add alias. It would be nice see under which names an artist worked/works. E.g. The BPA and Fatboy Slim are one person.

TheSublimeSupine said on Tuesday, 06 April 2010:
Yeah, exactly Anubis... that's especially useful for Jazz standards. Think of all the songs that Frank Sinatra is famous for, but weren't written by him. "Composer" or "Songwriter" is probably better than just "writer" I guess.
That way, the Cole Porters and Burt Bacharach's of the world will get their dues. Limiting it to just "producer" is only going to apply to (non hiphop) artists like Prince or Quincy Jones, etc.

DJ Anubis said on Tuesday, 06 April 2010:
Am I the only one thinking a "writer" textbox might be useful (and 'country' for that matter -> now in tags). I've come across a lot of covers that were written by (for instance) Diana Ross but were recorded FIRST by somebody else, which might look strange if the writer records the song it seems a cover, even though it's self written... dunno?

TheSublimeSupine said on Tuesday, 06 April 2010:
This should be "Sonny & Cher" in my opinion... that's the name of the "group". Would you list Led Zeppelin as "Robert Plant and John-Paul Jones and...etc.etc." No, because collectively they were Led Zeppelin. Same with Simon and Garfunkel. That's the name of the group, even though everyone knows that it's two individual artists.

I think that's maybe why there's the "producer" function, although clearly this holds a bias towards hiphop rather than singer-songwriter rock...

DJ Anubis said on Tuesday, 06 April 2010:
I've been wondering about a few of these group names myself.. I'm guessing we follow the official groupname, which in this case is "sonny & cher". Or we could also start adding The Beatles feat. Paul McCartney & John Lennon, just so they would show up. Remember if you search for Cher you will see Sonny & Cher too, but hey that's my personal opinion, what about you guys?

Xanadu said on Tuesday, 06 April 2010:
Shouldn't this be 2 individual artist?