At first, I thought these might be empty placeholders, but it turns out they’re actively being used.
For example, this recording of “Ordinary” by Alex Warren has been added to over 10 different Billboard weekly subseries—one for each week it charted.
In other words, if a song stays on the Hot 100 for 20 weeks, it ends up with 20 separate “part-of” relationships, each pointing to a distinct weekly subseries.
While this method certainly provides detailed weekly tracking, I wonder if this level of granularity might be a bit excessive? Are we, perhaps unintentionally, building a massive and somewhat redundant Billboard archive?
I’m curious to hear what others think about this approach. Is there a more streamlined or efficient way to model these chart histories?
I thought the “Billboard Hot 100” was not allowed due to copyright?
The one positive of a Series is that they stop people adding “releases” of this same data.
Agree it is quite “Noisy” on a release page, but no real answer if this is treated as a legit series. Noise will get louder if other countries charts are added.
MB is all about detailed data, imo. If the UI is cluttered, then I think this is a UI ticket/improvement, rather than limiting the addition of data (e.g. a discussion about making those relationships collapsed together by default or once there is a certain amount).
These charts can be (c), so we tread very carefully for a long time. But people started blocking any and all charts (including from defunct magazines etc) so I raised it with the boss. Word from on high (at the time, and in context) was that we could relax a little bit in actively policing the addition of charts.
That said, Billboard is known to be litigious, so I’m not sure how proactive we should be with this specific case.
(I have made the editor adding these, @CreightonGoldfishes, aware of this thread)
I’ve been wondering in general what the preferred style is for these types of series and subseries. It seems like recording series do not support date attributes… if they did it may be better to relate these to a single series with number and date attributes. Then the relationships for the recordings would be:
part of: [Billboard Hot 100] (in: 2025-05-03 number: 1) (in: 2025-05-10 number: 4)
I don’t know how this would effect the series display but it would eliminate the need to maintain dozens of subseries.
Edit: obviously this doesn’t lessen the number of relationships to the recording. Now that I think about it though, I guess you could have ranges for the date if the track was in the same spot for multiple weeks.
part of: [Billboard Hot 100] (in: 2025-05-03 thru 2025-05-17 number: 1) (in: 2025-05-17 number: 4)
I didn’t think there would be a copyright issue with those (as there was one or two before me and it seems like they get wikipedia articles, at least for the year-end charts). If it’s an issue I’ll stop, take them down, or limit it to the top 10/40 or whatever.
I maybe went a bit overboard with those. I was messing around with a bookmarklet and found a simple way of adding a list of recording mbids as series in order. I had local playlists of the billboard charts from using troi to get the spotify playlist as they post it, so I figured it was an interesting bit of data I could add as series.
I too would like us to be able to display/record chart stuff more frequently (of course for me that would be things like the UK Top 40) but I was always under the impression that we couldn’t due to copyright nonsense
Although then again I add plenty of charts from magazines so meh.
You can make a ticket! Let me know if you need a hand or if you would like me to make it.
I have to be honest, considering this similar ticket hasn’t been picked up:
I’m not sure this would happen soon, either. But good things take time, and MB wasn’t built in a day
Perhaps a broader ticket like “collapse any relationship that has X amount” could be useful, but it would take a bit more thought. MB has a lot of complicated edge cases.
Will there be a new UI for this? i’ll appreciate that.