8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

A Letterboxd for Music

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I’m thinking about Letterboxd. I joined this trendy film lover’s platform a few weeks ago, and — hey whaddaya know — I’m enjoying it. Here’s my profile. I’m logging the movies I watch and the ones I want to watch, which is my main reason for using Letterboxd. (I’ve gone through my journal and back-tracked some movies I watched in the past year before I joined.) Now I’m starting to enjoy the platform’s social aspects and how it’s a powerful place for film discussion and discovery.

Film critic Scott Tobias wrote an informative article on Letterboxd and its culture for The Ringer. Here’s a paragraph from that: 

“Diary” was one of the words Matthew Buchanan focused on when he and his cofounder, Karl von Randow, were conceiving Letterboxd in the years before it launched in 2011. The other word was “Lists.” Those were the building blocks of the service, and they’re almost embarrassingly true to how the cinephile mind works to compartmentalize the films that pass through it. The common denominator among Letterboxd users tends to be a compulsion to log and order the things they’ve seen, which many of them were already doing using spreadsheets or pen and paper. Letterboxd is a social media site that opens up those habits to public scrutiny, but the trade-off is that it also functions as a vast warehouse of opinion and hard data, an opportunity both to survey reactions to popular films and head down various rabbit holes. “Social film discovery” is how the homepage labels it—a phrase that’s in keeping with the no-frills, unassuming nature of the site.

Die-hard movie fans and fanatical music heads are similar. That paragraph could easily be talking about album collectors. The article also contains this quote about film buffs: “There’s still the delusion that you can see everything, that you can really have an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire expanse and breadth of the medium, which is not really on the table when it comes to literature or art.” Literature or art but not music. Because music collectors have the same mentality.

Where’s the Letterboxd of music? That’s an excellent idea. Replace ‘movies’ with ‘music’ and imagine a musical Letterboxd to keep track of and discuss the albums we listen to. We’ll make themed or best-of lists and professional music critics will rub shoulders with amateur and aspiring critics with their opinions. And, like on Letterboxd, the pros can be looser (and funnier) in their comments and reviews than on their employers’ sites, which makes things fun.

As mentioned in The Ringer article, another feature is no film (or album) is too old for discussion. “Release dates don’t matter at Letterboxd, and conversations can happen about any film at any time, which gives it an advantage over formal publications, which peg their coverage around embargo dates …” It’s like hanging out at the indie record/video store. The new releases might be the first thing we talk about, but our discussion eventually turns to rating the classics and obscure favorites.

For music, this kinda sounds like the lovechild of Last.FM and Discogs. But, while those sites have their particular focuses (‘scrobbling‘ and marketplace) this musical Letterboxd is solely about music nerds and fans congregating and talking about music. Am I missing something? Is there something out there like this? Let’s make it happen.

Better Living Through Metadata

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Prague Library

I’m finally digging into Dani Deahl’s informative article on metadata from a couple of months back in The Verge. All of the quoted text is from that article:

In an ideal world, once a song is finished, the metadata would be crafted by the artist or the artist’s producer, and they would submit that data to the record label, distributor, or publisher(s) involved for verification and distribution. In reality, the process is frequently more rushed and haphazard — artists and labels hurry the process along in order to get songs out, and metadata is frequently cleaned up later as mistakes are noticed.

Traditionally, the producer wears administrative — and therapeutic — hats in addition to the more recognized sonic-shaping guise.1Check out Richard James Burgess’s seminal The Art of Music Production for an overview of all the job entails. I could see ‘metadata’ falling under the producer’s responsibility 25+ years ago if metadata was as important as it is today. Now, ‘producer’ mostly means something different and is often the same role as the artist. So, in this better world we’re imagining, who wears the metadata hat?

I vote for the mastering engineer. There’s already an ‘elite’ rung for mastering engineers certified by the Mastered For iTunes program. Let’s find a way to certify mastering engineers (and potentially producers, or studio engineers, and even record label managers) as Metadata Ambassadors. As an artist — or a label — you will be assured that if you use a certified mastering engineer, your metadata will be collected, organized, and accurately submitted to the appropriate parties.

Of course, more artists are mastering their own work2and I have strong feelings that they should not do this, but I’ll save that rant for another day. so the process of metadata submission would be open to all. But if you enlist someone certified — that is, a person trained in the dark art of metadata — then not only will you not have to deal with it (beyond providing requested info), you can rest easy. Metadata’s sorted.

Having a centralized database and set standards for music metadata — [Jaxsta rep Joshua] Jackson’s idea of an IMDb for music — sounds like a straightforward goal, but getting there has stumped many of music’s largest and most powerful entities for decades. There are many reasons for this, but the tectonic shift to streaming is a major contributor.

Again, let’s imagine a better world. In this one, the music industry actually bands together and puts some funding into mitigating the chaos. Discogs is the closest thing we’ve got to an IMDB for music. A light partnership and investment from the industry could implement other essential data to a Discogs listing and develop an API where this information is accessed and utilized by third-party platforms. There could be a ‘pro’ view for a Discogs listing that reveals ISRCs, publishing splits, rights holder contact information, and so on. It’s not a perfect proposal, especially as much of the data will remain crowdsourced, but it would be a million times better than what we’ve got. And, most importantly, this information would exist in a web interface that is accessible and understandable to the layperson. Much more so than an online spreadsheet on some PRO’s backend.

There isn’t much agreement on if any particular arm of the music industry should lead the way or be responsible for fixing music metadata. Some think digital music distribution companies like TuneCore or DistroKid could do more to educate artists, as it’s often an artist’s only touchpoint before their music is live on streaming platforms. Others think the streaming platforms themselves could set an example for better metadata by displaying more credits, which would encourage everyone involved to make sure the data is right.

I’m co-signing all of the above. The distributors can undoubtedly do more, and none of the distributors I work with ask for exhaustive metadata. By ‘exhaustive,’ I’m talking about no-brainer stuff like songwriter and publisher names. But I’d love to see distribution go even more in-depth, asking for information like the producers, the musicians, the studio and its location … liner note stuff. I know that the streaming platforms aren’t listing this info yet but why should they if the distributors don’t have it? It’s not like Spotify is going to add liner notes when that information isn’t already available for them to exploit.

I’d love to see a significant distributor lead the way and throw down the gauntlet on metadata. To say, “we’re taking metadata seriously and will start logging the info whether anyone uses it or not.” And, once all this data is in hand, they pressure the DSPs to include it. Admittedly, including these ‘liner notes’ is but a small competitive differentiator, but it *is* one and streaming platforms need any they can get.

Pie-in-the-sky stuff, I know. But we need to imagine that better world to draw us closer to it. So, how do we make these things — or alternate solutions that drive us in a positive direction — happen?