We were talking in /r/nin about some dumb problems with NIN's library on Spotify earlier and I'm hoping maybe by talking about it here we'll get some more examples of this sort of bullshit and maybe pointing out enough messes will get it fixed.
If you look at Nine Inch Nails's page on Spotify it shows their discography order as follows. Mistakes or things that shouldn't be in the middle of studio albums are bolded.
Bad Witch -> Recoiled -> Hesitation Marks -> Pretty Hate Machine Remaster -> The Slip -> Ghosts -> Year Zero Remixed -> Year Zero -> With Teeth -> Downward Spiral Deluxe?? -> Still -> And all that could have been -> Things Falling Apart -> The Fragile -> Further Down The Spiral -> Closer To God -> Broken -> Fixed -> Head Like a Hole -> Pretty Hate Machine (original)
Issues as follows:
- Why is the 2010 remaster of PHM listed as a 2010 release?? Sabbath's remasters still have their original, correct release year and just put the remaster year in the title. At least they appear in the correct order, even if Sabbath's releases are their own shitshow with Paranoid showing up in LastFM's top ten THREE TIMES entirely because of Spotify.
- In order to even see Not The Actual Events and Add Violence, a new user would have to scroll past thirty years of discography including an EP with Coil, two copies of PHM, five remix albums, a single and a live album. (For those not aware, NTAE and Add Violence are major studio releases, part of a trilogy with Bad Witch. They are the same length and quality as Bad Witch. But they are EPs while Bad Witch is an album for marketing reasons alone.
- Why are Still and All that could have been separate? They're the same release on two discs. (Halo 17) Should be a All That Could Have Been/Still master release, and it should not be listed in the main Album releases as it is Remixes and Live
- The Downward Spiral defaults to the deluxe version with fucked up transitions, fucked up album art, (Deluxe Edition) affixed to it, a bunch of singles and demos it shouldn't have, etc. In order to access the original album, you have to click a basically hidden button and select it. That album art is cropped weird. Further, the release year is wrong. Also, why are PHM and it's remaster/deluxe (extra track) listed separately but this one isn't? Be consistent.
- A new listener is going to be really confused as to why TDS came out in 2004, or why FDTS and Closer To God are dated 10 years before it. Same deal with PHM
- Recoiled is an EP with the band Coil. It does not belong in albums, it should be in Singles and EPs... way more than the first two parts of the Trilogy should be.
- Head Like a Hole (1990) is a single. It literally only contains demos & remixes of HLAH and Down In It. Why is it listed as a fucking studio album?
- Why is Fixed, a remix album of Broken, listed as having come out first? Fixed was released in Dec. 92, Broken in Sept. 92.
Other, non-NIN issues with Spotify's catalogue entirely off the top of my head
- The aforementioned issue with remaster tags on most music but Black Sabbath's is particularly bad. https://www.last.fm/music/Black+Sabbath for a glimpse... Go look at Sabbath, almost all of their music has (xxxx remastered version) behind it
- Tubeway Army's Replicas is listed three separate times with different artists. My lastfm is messed up because which of these releases you get is basically random as the suggested result when you search replicas changes depending on how far into typing the word you get. repl gives you a different result from repli and replic. replica gives you a cover by Deadsy.
- Frank Black's self-titled has a song titled has a song called Tossed Instrumental. This is how it sometimes scrobbles from spotify. If you were wondering, there is no version of this song with lyrics.
Spotify needs to really, really unfuck their tags. Navigating this service is kind of miserable, at the moment. I can't imagine getting into a band like Nine Inch Nails is very fun in 2019 if you don't do outside research because of how much of a mess their page is.
The current method of separating major releases from singles and EPs is no longer functional. With collaborations & mixtapes, & now with "recently popular" replacing popular releases it takes a lot of scrolling to find artists with long discographies' earlier works. Further, the EP is now being used as a major release format more often and arguably the same can be said for studio mixtapes (Playboi Carti, Drake's *If You're Reading This) Go try and listen to one of the first few Sabbath albums... have fun scrolling for 30 seconds to find it.
They should do it like this:
Major Studio Releases: (For NIN, this would encompass albums & the Trilogy ONLY.) Let this include studio "mixtapes" and let this include EPs in general, because they are more often"major" releases with original studio songs that won't get heard otherwise, and certainly are more deserving of being seen with the rest of the albums than a remix album or a live album.
Remix and Live Albums under a separate category. This would encompass singles like the Head Like a Hole halo since it's all just demos and remixes.
This is a bit of a long post but I was hoping I formatted it okay. Just... man, I wish we could just do it like Discogs and have this be fan organized because I'm sure Spotify's response is something along the lines of 'too much effort/too expensive' while they claim ad revenue and pay artists a fraction of a cent per stream.
Submitted April 18, 2019 at 04:31AM by KaxeyTV http://bit.ly/2Va5r41
No comments:
Post a Comment