Like many, I’m mourning and listening to Dolly Parton’s music. I haven’t written a post related to an artist’s death since Prince left us in 2016. I’m not sure what my internal algorithm is for this, but besides Dolly being such a unifying cultural icon, there is the small detail that I noticed a significant uptick in people searching music4dance for “Dolly Parton” over the last few weeks. I don’t have a good way to track statistics on this kind of search, but it was significant enough that random viewing of my diagnostic logs for other issues kept popping up her name. Qualitatively, that’s pretty amazing and hasn’t happened before.

So, as the title says – which of her songs are your favorites to dance to? And what style of dance? I’m particularly interested in hearing from Country Western dancers, since I don’t have enough background in those dances to categorize them myself. Feel free to respond to this post, use the general feedback page, or add the songs/vote on existing songs directly. I’d love to see this part of the catalog grow as our small tribute to her memory.

Searching for Artists

As I reviewed Dolly Parton songs, I took another look at how I catalog artists in music4dance. This is similar to what happened when I dug into Prince songs in 2016. In both cases, a review highlighted some of the limitations of that process.

For Prince, I improved the process by adding a feature that showed all the songs with an artist field containing exactly “Prince.” That narrowed down the results to only his songs. But it was a bit too narrow in that it excluded songs where the artist field contained a band name or a collaborator. But as in much of this work, I aim for incremental improvement and wait for feedback before investing more time.

A few years back, I returned to the searching for artist issue due to another spike in artist searches – this one for a different reason – Dancing With the Stars aired episodes featuring the music of Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift. Initially, I wrote a blog post about what I saw as the limitations, but asked for feedback before proceeding.

A few months later, I implemented improved text searching based on that feedback, adding more capabilities to chip away at the problem. In the case of Dolly Parton, you could now search for all songs that contain Dolly Parton in the artist field. That pulls in everything you see on the Dolly Parton artist page, as well as collaborations with Kenny Rogers, Vince Gill, Willie Nelson, etc. But not songs that have Dolly in the title, like the multiple versions of Hello Dolly! It’s a little less successful for Prince, mostly because other artists such as Prince Royce show up in that search.

An Incremental Improvement

The other issue is that you have to know about the advanced search option for this to work at all. I decided to make an incremental improvement to discoverability. When you land on the Dolly Parton page, it implies the page will list all the Dolly Parton songs in the catalog. So I added a link near the top of the page –Search all songs with “Dolly Parton” in the artist field – to indicate that there may be more Dolly Parton songs available and to provide a smooth path for getting to that list.

What Next?

I think the two biggest remaining gaps are some form of Artist Index and the fact that I’m still keeping the artist field as free text rather than setting up a relational database where artists are a first-class object and songs can be related to multiple artists.

Now that I’m thinking about this again, I’m pretty sure I’ll implement an Artist Index of some kind in the foreseeable future. I’m unlikely to tackle the relational database solution anytime soon, but I might make incremental improvements to how I handle the artist field.

What do you think? Do you run into issues searching for artists? Or are there other improvements to search or elsewhere that you would prioritize over these? Feedback is always welcome.

Step of the Month

The “Step of the Month” for September is the same as the ask at the beginning of this post. Which Dolly Parton songs are your favorites to dance to? And what style of dance? Feel free to respond to this post, use the general feedback page, or add the songs/vote on existing songs directly. I’d love to see this part of the catalog grow as our small tribute to her memory.