That deal gets worse all the time.
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Interesting! That would be awesome. AFAIK, that could work well for jazz also. I wonder if Primephonic worked that way? Never tried it.
It would also work well for any live performances of existing music that may or may not be played by the original composers — so, honestly, this metadata should exist for almost all genres of music.
My library has tons of jazz covers, as you mention. I’ve also got a bunch of Metallica covers from other bands, as well as some live performances, and it would be nice to see them categorized in this fashion too.
Heck, for people who love jam bands like Phish, an app like this would be a Godsend.
You’re right, that would also be awesome.
Imagine having to re-tag the whole Apple Music catalog! That would be a lot of work. I’m not even sure Apple could unilaterally change the tagging system. Maybe the music labels send them the music already tagged and they have to sell them as is…
Everything is tagged according to Apple’s specifications, as well as to meet a general standard of how individual performers and artists need to be tagged so their streams/downloads/purchases can be reported, and so they can be paid by other parties.
Apple could start asking for other metadata, but the whole iTunes metadata thing is… well, it’s been around for 20 years. I’d guess it’s a massive SQL library or some other equivalent. Changing things would be a huge technical challenge.
You can argue that they need to make some changes, because their current apps for streaming music aren’t good, and you’re probably right, because they have 20 years of technical debt that makes it difficult for them to do any of this well. (Part of the reason Spotify feels perceptibly faster is because their data backend is designed for low-latency mobile operation.)
Anyway, my point is just that this whole thing is extremely complicated. Sounds like @mstamper77 also has experience with this. It’s not easy to wrangle all this data, to get it from others, or to report it in a way that can pay those who need to be paid.
The film industry was very smart to put everything into IMDB.
Apple Music’s Style Guide is pretty prescriptive when it comes to classical music titles (album and track), artists, composers, and general conventions.
I believe Apple’s guide is largely consistent with the guidelines developed by the Music Business Association. (Apple was part of the industry consortium that provided input.)
The guidelines are fine as far as they go, but ideally there would be a robust set of classical music appropriate metadata fields, too.
It will finally be released on March 28
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Cool, looking forward to it.