As ListenBrainz becomes more popular, it becomes increasingly a better source of listen counts / statistics across platforms and services. The purpose of this thread is to bring up and discuss potential new features for ListenBrainz in order to get feedback before adding a ticket requesting the change.
To get things started…
I wonder if it might be of interest to the artists to see how many times each of their songs were listened to each month (with general information like percentages by country or continent, or love/hate ratings). Of course this would have to be an “opt in” service with the artist subscribing and providing an email address to be used for receiving the monthly reports. I could imagine this might be of interest to smaller independent artists, especially if they could access the information for free. If nothing else, it would give them the satisfaction of knowing that someone actually does listen to their music.
I’m just “Brainz-storming” here, so I don’t know if this makes any sense. I also don’t know how much additional processing would be required, which may make it a non-starter. My main thought with this suggestion was to try to find a way that ListenBrainz could be used to benefit the artists that provide much of our listening entertainment.
I think it makes a lot of sense, give artists the power of the ListenBrainz database~ I don’t know how difficult it might be, but in addition to email (which some younger artists may or may not use), we could also set up a bot on a few social medias to PM these stats too~
I wonder if artist accounts* might be a feature that could solve both of these. from there, the artist would be able to see detailed stats for everything, top listeners, top (and bottom) tracks and albums, what playlists their tracks are in, maybe even post to their ListenBrainz followers and see other top artists of their listeners. they’d also be able to set up email/DM alerts from here.
of course, there might have to be some sort of verification system, but I dunno… most of what I mentioned would quite possibly be included on the future artist pages, so wouldn’t really be private. the only thing that would be is the alerts and posting to followers
*not necessarily for submitting listens, but it could be an option if the artist wants
My concern with that is it opens the door to an artist gaming the system to artificially inflate the number of listens for one or more of their recordings, and take advantage of the 'Brainz organization reputation to try to legitimize their artificial popularity.
what do you mean by this? a PM (private message) in theory would be very much the same as an email, just via a social media (like Twitter X, Facebook, or Mastodon)…
Sorry, I missed the PM part. I’m not into any of the social media stuff, but isn’t there a way to take a PM sent to you and make it public? Then again, I suppose that could also be done with an email message.
I mean, you can take a screenshot of both, and I guess technically on Mastodon (and I believe the whole Fediverse) a PM is just a post with privacy set so only you and the other user(s) tagged in the post can see it, I don’t quite get exactly how that works yet…
Personally, I think it would (usually) benefit MusicBrainz in general if artists were more involved because that would help simplify questions like “are these two artists the same and should they be merged” or clarify “artist intent”. The trouble is that most of the artists are not metadata nerds, and are primarily focussed on making music (not that that’s a bad thing).
I feel like all of this should just be public and would very well fit artist/album/track pages. As it is on Last.fm. I think it’s in the spirit of ListenBrainz to have statistics public for everyone to see.
Spotify is very good at this, it sees artists as their audience just as much as the listeners. I have had some feedback from artists who would like to see/use this too.
I put a screenshot of a sharable graphic, aimed at artists, from last years Wrapped/Spotify for Artists here:
In terms of a more general ‘show how much an album/track was listened to’, this is a guaranteed (public) feature of the upcoming recording/release LB pages (correct me if I’m wrong @mr_monkey)
If there was artist accounts/artist specific features, how would MB go about verifying artists?
I was thinking about something mildly related, but with labels rather than artists and had the same question. But with labels I feel like it would be easier to find verifiable contact information to prove the person represents the label. But artists I feel like would be hard and require a lot of work from MB team members to verify?
Listening based stats are indeed in the works, we are mainly waiting for me to implement a good artist/RG/recording page on ListenBrainz to be able to display it.
For what it’s worth, we are very very very unlikely to make any of this data private/semi-private. There are multiple reasons but the most prominent are:
all the underlying data is likely public already through LB and could be recomputed anyway
more generally, the project aims to be as open as possible; these stats are actually pretty cool and potentially useful for everyone For example, finding other listeners of a band you like
our team doesn’t have the resources or patience required for verifying artists
Note: I’m only talking about ListenBrainz here, I’m not involved enough to have an opinion on verified artists in MusicBrainz
This has already happened in ListenBrainz, and we modified the code of conduct to clarify what we consider fair use, and make it clear that any such bot-like accounts will be dealt with appropriately.
Of course, that means some community management work down the line to detect and get rid of bad actors, but they are by far the exception and not the rule (and tend to be pretty straightforward to detect).
For example,