I get a great list of artists and all sorts of Pauls, however, I would really like to get a list of the Top Pauls. A similar search in LastFM would return something like:
Paul McCartney
Paul Simon
Paul Kalkbrenner
Sean Paul
Paul van Dyk
Paul Oakenfold
Paul Weller
Is there anyway to get the search to drive results by popularity?
The search server just works on strings so it currently does string comparisons for rank.
It has been proposed to use listenbrainz as a popularity metric for the search server but that is not likely to happen any time soon.
OK - thanks, I had a quick look at the listenbrainz and I see what you mean, it’s still early days, not sure I’m quite technical in this area to lend a hand.
One thing you can do to help ListenBrainz along is import your Last.FM listen history to https://beta.listenbrainz.org/ and let us know in #metabrainz how it goes (esp. if you notice any issues).
Another option might be to look by how many releases they have had.Often more popular artists wil have a lot of releases. Or at least it might be more relevant to Musicbrainz in terms of popularity.
When originally written did not consider popularity because it didnt seem very fair, i.e why should the most popular artists come top of the list just by virtue of being popular. But it did become apparent that is what users wanted after all and I did consider something based on no of releases but then it was decide dto replace search with solr search so was never done.
I don’t know if a first name search should give popularity first. Last name, I can see that. But certainly, full name, if I want to add Paul McCartney to a listing, popularity should apply. The odds of another Paul McCartney being used in a listing is far fewer than the former Beatle being used.
The reason I think a Top Search is beneficial is it allows developers, such as myself to write applications from the point of view of current popular artists instead of equality, which I agree does sound unfair.
The problem with using releases is this may not take into account artists who’ve become popular very recently and have a short back-catalog.
For me trending is a primary business case when researching music, as it allows me to understand the artist and the modern-era.
But this should not necessarily be the default way MusicBrainz works, whilst trending my be important for you it would not be for me. Of course because the data is freely available if you have a particular business case you could consider creating your own search index against your own version of the database.
Yes I agree that’s a good idea, looking over some of LastFms data they have a listeners stats, which is also paired with mbid.
I guess (massive assumption here!) if listenbrainz also contains a stat similar or incorporates this, then it would tie in nicely to support the kind of business case I’m looking at.
Perhaps there would be a way of getting my data into, which currently uses LastFM + MusicBrainz to send my stats back as an API request or daily import etc.
