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Guitar Hero
November 6, 2017
In discussion

Who is the composer? >> Improved labelling of Music

  • November 6, 2017
  • 69 replies
  • 1571 views
The classical music albums would need much better labeling, please. As music lovers yourself, you certainly appreciate how finding the classical music is greatly improved with good labeling. In practice, they need a different data set than your run-of-the-mill popular music albums.

Take an example: album Mutterissimo (https://www.deezer.com/us/album/14780657), track 1. Which concerto are we listening to, please? I.e. a critical piece of information is missing, the composer.

Take another example: Alfred Bendel Plays Beethoven Volume 3 (https://www.deezer.com/us/album/6462183). This definitely ought to be listed under 'Beethoven, Ludwig van'. If, for some reason, you have to reference the soloist, wouldn't that also be more logical under 'Brendel' than 'Alfred'?

69 replies

bluezzbastardzz
Superuser
Superuser
January 20, 2020

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.  :wink:

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).

ZZee ya, Hans-Jürgen (Bluezz Bastardzz and Indigo Rocks, live album on Deezer, last.fm/user/hjbardenhagen)
bluezzbastardzz
Superuser
Superuser
January 20, 2020

Similar ideas merged by staff, thank you.

 

ZZee ya, Hans-Jürgen (Bluezz Bastardzz and Indigo Rocks, live album on Deezer, last.fm/user/hjbardenhagen)
walker
Hitmaker
Hitmaker
January 20, 2020

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

Astell&Kern Norma SR15 + Sennheiser Momentum M2 AEG + Sennheiser HD 598 + Sony WH-1000XM2 + Sony WF-1000xm4 + own 2249 Hi-Fi/-Res Tracks + Deezer Freemium. Let's play!
bluezzbastardzz
Superuser
Superuser
May 1, 2020

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.

ZZee ya, Hans-Jürgen (Bluezz Bastardzz and Indigo Rocks, live album on Deezer, last.fm/user/hjbardenhagen)
Rudi
Ultimate Superstar
Ultimate Superstar
May 2, 2020

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 :wink:

Roadie
June 29, 2020

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.

 

Rudi
Ultimate Superstar
Ultimate Superstar
July 1, 2020

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 :thumbsup_tone2:

Roadie
July 30, 2020

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.

Roadie
July 30, 2020

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

Rockstar
July 30, 2020

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.

https://www.deezer.com/en/profile/3421485864