Who is the composer? >> Improved labelling of Music

It sounds trivial, but most of the time it is not Deezer’s fault if classical music is tagged poorly, they get this bad data from their providers this way, i.e. distributors and labels. But I agree that it makes finding the releases you want to hear pretty hard. For example I listened to several complete Ring cycles on Deezer lately, and especially the last one conducted live by Joseph Keilberth 1952 in Bayreuth was a mess considering the tags, it must have been catalogued by a poor intern somewhere who had no idea what he was looking at with no knowledge of what an opera, an aria, an act, Richard Wagner, a conductor or singers may be - or German umlauts. At least someone in the PR department added the important information that it’s “13 hours of music” in the album title.  

Long story short: most of the time when searching for classical music on streaming sites it pays off to use one of the performer’s name (including the soloist, conductor and orchestra) instead of and/or in addition to the composer.

Also you can search for labels on Deezer, e.g. with this term:

label:”Nimbus Records"

which is a British label featuring mostly classical music recorded in the spatial audio format Ambisonic (similar to the current 360 Real Audio format by Sony which is available in Deezer, too).

Similar ideas merged by staff, thank you.

It depends also in which country you are to see or not some songs. Rights reasons.

Have a look at this topic:

https://en.deezercommunity.com/deezer-catalogue-45/report-here-song-and-artist-missing-request-a-song-157

A related suggestion for improvement: As I am currently editing my long pipe organ playlist, it would be nice if the popup showing the full name when hovering the artist would also appear for the track and album, as these are usually much longer than the artist name and important for differentiating between tracks, but you cannot fully see them in a playlist. This should also work anywhere else of course, i.e. in the desktop app and web player, in the play queue, in normal view, in search results as well as on album and playlist pages. Not sure how this works in mobile apps, but it might be more problematic with their small screens.

Good point @bluezzbastardzz 

We've made some changes on the spacing for the tracks with those titles in mind so this point you mentioned touches on that too. I'll take care of the feedback and will let the teams know about it 

This is indeed an annoying issue for Classical Music in Deezer.

There are I am sure challenges.

Somehow Spotify seems to have managed to fix this whereas Deezer does not. See for instance this:

https://open.spotify.com/album/1D4llXtIz0GYjIEOpdyMSW

https://www.deezer.com/en/album/142346572

Please Deezer fix this.

I agree with what said that the classical music labels sometimes neglect to include the name of the composers. In some cases it seems they even go to great length to avoid including the name of the composer. Take for example this album by the Capouçon brothers (https://www.deezer.com/en/artist/240916). Someone seems to have tried really hard here not to include the composer. In the case of Duo pour violin & violoncelle (Composed in a concentration camp): I Allegro con fuocoo  they included “Composed in a concentration camp” by they did not mention the composer was Erwin Schulhoff.

Thank you for your detailed report @adj800x this is one of our recurrent issues, and I'm a fan of classical too. We've made some improvements with credits but there's more room here, so I'm going to forward your comments straight away to our relevant teams here at Deezer 

I would like to add to the many comments about the lack of composer data on Deezer. I pay £15 a month and find Deezer is very good for pop and rock and  flow works very well for me. But the information on the classical music tracks is extremely poor. For example, at the moment while I work in my study I am listening to Mahler (played by the Alban Berg Ensemble Wien). Deezer didn't tell me this, I had to look it up on google! I hope Deezer continues to work on a solution to this problem because otherwise it’s a great streaming service.

As part of their contract with music labels, Deezer should insist that composer information is included.

Hello @Karob, agreed, we are working on improving the information in the catalogue (year of release, featurings, composers...) however keep in mind that this is a huge task and that we need to find a way to do it semi-automatically with databases.

Like on other streaming sites, the available album cover is often the only source for additional information with classical music releases. So check the play queue as well, because there you will get the biggest version of the album cover in Deezer and might identify some small print info that is not recognisable in the thumbnail image.

Also clicking on the currently playing track title in the player bar will lead you to the album page where you might find some more info like additional artists for each track.

Also I would like to say, developers can use Primephonic’s metadata scheme, it was pretty cool until sold to Apple and deprecated.

The suggestion to improve classical music metadata was made 4 years ago, but there has been no improvement so far. At a minimum, classical music should list all the artists, composer(s), each work title, and movement names. Apple Music has a separate field for composer, but Spotify adds it to the artists, which is better than nothing, though not ideal. Many albums don’t even list the work name! They list the movement (e.g., I. Allegro) but not the work! This is unacceptable for classical music. Look at this album for an example: 

Except for track 7, the work name isn’t listed. All the other major music services list the work titles:

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/gade-chamber-works-vol-3/1213196965

https://listen.tidal.com/album/71340258

https://www.amazon.com/music/player/albums/B06XH41R75

​