I was under the impression that last.fm links should not be added to release groups because the site is not whitelisted, so have been removing them when I find them (with only yes votes, so far). I wonder now if this was correct. In particular, I found this open ticket: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/STYLE-1604
Currently if you paste a last.fm link to a release group, you get the five standard link types for an unrecognized URL (standalone website / discography entry / fan pages / reviews / crowdfunding page). Four of those are clearly wrong IMO, but you could make a case for “discography entry”, which is what is normally chosen when the link is added. I am not so sure, because last.fm doesn’t really curate discographies (the existence of the page only means that someone has scrobbled a track with this text in the album title field). Also because the pages sometimes have attached tracklists, which could include bonus tracks, they sit somewhere between a release group and a release on MB. (If that ticket is accepted, there would have to be some guidance on which of the usually many possible last.fm pages should actually be linked to the RG.)
Would appreciate some opinions on whether I should (a) remove these links, (b) ignore them when they’re there but don’t actively add them, or (c) actively add them.
I would personally add them mainly because Last.FM is only place you can get user based reviews for releases as well as bios for artists. If you have a media server like Plex or Jellyfin you would know that while it uses Musicbrainz for scraping releases. It relies on Last FM for Artist artwork and bio and sometimes even album reviews.
While we have platforms like Allmusic for album reviews, it can only gives albums reviews if it’s very popular and it’s only for albums, not singles/EPs.
That’s were Last.FM is useful, it can allow users to add reviews were services like Allmusic can’t so that on it’s own can also be considered as “reviews” along with “discography entry”. Not to mention we have something to track popularity of music even though it’s kind of redundant when we have Listenbrainz.
Honestly I wish Musicbrainz would have just implemented Artist profile photos and bios so that I didn’t have to rely on another platform. Technically Wikipedia links do fill up the role of Bios but if the artist is smaller there is lesser chance that artist has a Wikipedia entry.
For clarity, this is not about last.fm links on artist pages, which are definitely fine (and whitelisted), only release groups. I’m not aware of any user review feature on last.fm album pages: there are comments (the “shoutbox”), and a wiki, but neither really qualifies as reviews… and they are often empty, except for the most popular pages.
If you want reviews, RateYourMusic has many, and is whitelisted at both release group and individual release level.
Your not wrong Last.FM doesn’t really consider them as reviews and more so as a wiki. I am aware of RateYourMusic and have linked to several releases already. But the main reason I’m interested in Last.FM is cause they are linked to media servers whereas RateYourMusic is Limited.
Also a good example for how Last.FM is better is for an artist like Bryan Adams. Allmusic has legal beef with him so they just refuse to have anything about him there so all his release have no data. That’s were Last.FM fills in that gap like you can see in this release the wiki is filled by someone. It isn’t considered a review, more like a description but this added information gets added as a substitute for Allmusic so this can help Musicbrainz releases as well for additional music if someone did add a description.
And it is awful. I have been trying to play with Navidrome, but the constant linking into Last.FM is a headache as it is keeps picking the wrong artist. That inability of Last.FM to acknowledge two people have the same name is killing my Navidrome experiment. Instead of someone famous like Ian Curtis, I get an obscure American. And there are certainly better places for Artist artwork. I’d rather have something properly curated like Discogs as a source.
It is a pity MB has never found a way around the legal issues with an artist’s image. There was some legal shenanigans a few years back which made MB drop all artist images.
I agree with @Chaban, scratch below the surface of Last.FM and a mess is found. It is not a reliable source.
Why are some artist pages missing images, comments, album art, and other user content?
Last.fm is legally and morally responsible for all content displayed on its website, including content submitted by users. While we are inherently against censorship, we have a moral, business, and legal obligation to prevent extremely offensive and objectionable content, such as hate speech and racism, from being posted by users on the website. Such content goes against our Community Guidelines, and Acceptable Use Policy, and has no place on Last.fm.
As such, we reserve the right to delete or hide user content which in our view is objectionable, breaks the law, or infringes on copyright. Pages which are more predisposed to racism and hate speech may be filtered to a greater or lesser extent to ensure compliance with our terms of use and community guidelines. We don’t like doing it, but sometimes it’s the most appropriate response.
I agree. Last.FM not being able to distinguish artists with the same name is extremely frustrating. Even if users add the bios for every single artists with the same name. The popular artist will always win when it comes to whose face will on that artist profile.
Also Discogs doesn’t help when it’s database is mostly for physical releases over digital releases.
This is why Musicbrainz is almost perfect. It’s the most complete for physical and digital music releases but it sucks for anything related to the artist itself. If you want a biography you can only hope someone else made a Wikipedia otherwise you get nothing. Even if the artist has a official home page with their own bio, it won’t display that on the MB artist page cause it’s exclusive to Wikipedia only.
I wish there was a field to add a short biography for an artist on MB. This isn’t just so MB can have it’s own biography field without relying on external links but this could help distinguish artists that have a common name. Yes that’s the whole point of disambiguation field and it’s still valid when glancing at a list of artists but sometimes a short summary of an artist on the artist page would be more informative cause not everyone will have a Wikipedia page dedicated to them. And since we can’t get artist photos cause of legal issues that is next best thing.
Since people are mentioning things like bios and various sites strengths and weaknesses https://www.theaudiodb.com/ Is another source for extra data. Jellyfin uses it. And rather than artist names it uses IDs, you just import artists and releases from MusicBrainz. But, doesn’t have reviews.
I think the ticket linked by chaban points to RG links being ‘officially’ fine as of now (even if the application is not quite clear and maybe never will be).
Even though I find last.fm links of very limited value, I leave them when I see them. I guess someone finds it helpful, and I find it easy to not click the link.
Yeah, I think that’s my reading too: although it is awkward that they don’t really have an appropriate type (see reosarevok’s comment on that ticket). I can leave them, but won’t add them… would be good if this could be resolved more definitively eventually, e.g. by adding a “Last.fm” type. There is still the issue about which link(s) to add for RGs in which the artist / album name is variable (and so each combination that was ever scrobbled creates a new last.fm page – this includes little variations like unicode punctuation, “and” vs “&” etc, as well as more obvious name changes).
The display could also be improved if they’re being kept. Currently the link displays %artist_name%/%album_name% in the link list, which can get really long. Just %album_name% would probably be fine, or even just “Last.fm” similar to most link types.
That’s another issue I have Last.FM links being added as RG only. Since Last.FM already uses MB DB for it’s own database sometimes someone will add pre-release album to MB and it will show up on Last.FM as a “Latest release” on the artist page and since it’s a pre-release no one has actually scrobbled it. I mention this cause MB releases tend to show up automatically on Last FM but the issue is that streaming services title albums differently compared to MB.
The worst part is the album named for MB ends up being the least popular cause more people are likely to be listening to a streaming release over physical or listening to a music service that uses MB as it’s source.
The other thing is how do we choose which last.fm album to link to the release group? Should we choose the album that matches MB’s title guidelines or the popular album, or just add all of them to MB RG.
Recently Last.FM became independent of Paramount so I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or bad thing. Good thing might be that they have more freedom to do what they want then being restricted by a cooperation such as Paramount. At the same time they are going to heavily rely on donations now that Paramount won’t be financially carrying them.
In recent news, the best thing they have done is get rid of a lot of bot accounts faking scrobbles so perhaps this is sign they are going in a good direction but only time will tell. I just don’t understand how after using MBDB as a source, how can’t they still figure out this by now.
This. Surely it would save Last.Fm so much time and effort if they just piggybacked harder on MB. If they just had a way to link their DB to MB with a simple link then a mess would be solved.
I would be against this without a redesign on MB to better group links of the same type (e.g. collapse the list, with the option to click to expand), otherwise all the variations will crowd out the links to higher quality databases. Or last.fm links could just always be hidden, as is the case right now for other links with the “discography entry” type.
This, surely would be the key. I don’t know why some shops get a priority, but others don’t. I’d just drop “last.fm” into the “not important enough to show” list.
Also how many Release Groups would actually gather more than one link? I assume this is still a smaller percentage of releases?
I would expect it to be quite common (at least for moderately popular RGs) if you actually tried to document all of them, because any variation in the text string for either the artist or album metadata creates a new page. As an example, all Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds albums (that I checked) also have pages just under “Nick Cave” – maybe that could be rejected for being too wrong? (I assumed there would also be a “Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds” variant, but in fairness to Last.fm they autocorrect that to &: that doesn’t mean the pages don’t exist though, you just have to overrule the redirect in the URL.) Add variations in Unicode or non-Unicode punctuation and things start multiplying quite quickly.
Similarly things with “(anniversary edition)” or “(remaster)” in the title could be rejected as not applying to the whole release group. But there would need to be guidelines about this, and it should probably be a bit strict to avoid things getting out of hand: for artists, people just tend to link the most popular page (typically without unicode punctuation) even if several variants exist, which is sensible IMO.
Obviously always likely to be an extreme example, but Pink Floyd have 122 pages of albums (20 per page, 2423 in total) – I think there is some cut-off for the number of listeners to make that list, so it isn’t even the true number. Of the first 20, three are Dark Side of the Moon, and three are The Wall. (Dark Side with or without “The” at the beginning, plus a remaster, and for The Wall two different remasters and “(disc 2)”. So in fairness some of these could be rejected if being a bit strict about what is correct and general enough to be linked to an RG.)
I think the display might just be an accident because Last.fm links are displayed with the logo on artist pages, and the code has been inherited by other pages. Something similar used to happen with Metal Archives on release groups: if somebody linked to a review on Metal Archives, it would show up in the link panel labelled “Metal Archives” and with the logo, even though other reviews were not shown at the time. (This was very noticeable because at some point links to album pages on MA were blacklisted on RGs, because they correspond instead to individual releases.) The eventual fix was in fact to display all reviews, with text/logo specific to reviews.
So the short version is - Last.FM is unreliable junk. It almost sounds like a need for a new hidden data type of “and other links that we won’t show you unless you click a button”.
Ha, well I was trying to be politer, but…
In fairness, I quite like Last.fm for what it’s primarily for (basically ListenBrainz, but older, and their events system isn’t bad either) – but would agree that it is not at all a good source for discography information. Hence thinking that adding links on MB with the “discography entry” type is not a good idea… and certainly not lots of them for a single RG.
