We continue to add to the music4dance Halloween song catalog. As of this writing, 1649 songs are tagged as Halloween and have a positive number of dance votes. Up nearly 500 songs from last year.

This year, rather than repeating information about how the catalog works or the motivations for how I’ve set up the pages (you can see that in previous Halloween posts), I’d like to focus on where I’ve overshot. What I mean by that is that I’ve pulled in songs labeled Halloween from many different sources. Since the catalog defaults to ordering by total dance votes, that puts things like Christina Aguilera’s “Candyman” at the top of the list. This isn’t obviously a Halloween song. It’s definitely not spooky. It may be useful at a Halloween dance to throw in a peppy Swing as a palate cleanser between spooky songs. Or it may be that it’s a fun song to do an exhibition dance to in costume.

The Dancing With The Stars Issue

In fact, one of the reasons “Candyman” ended up on the music4dance Halloween list is that it was featured in DWTS season 27’s Halloween episode. I haven’t been very consistent about cataloging DWTS music, but I’ve done enough that it contributes to the issue when I tag something as Halloween just because it’s on one of their Halloween episodes. I could fix this by retroactively changing all the DWTS Halloween tags to “Halloween Night” tags. Then I could manually go through and re-add Halloween to anything that I think qualifies. Or I could hope others do that over time.

A small detour into searching

I was going to provide a list of songs DWTS labeled as “Halloween,” but I realized this is another case of having the right data but not properly indexed for this task (and I’d run out of space if I indexed all tags this way). But it’s pretty much the same case as the dance votes by a specific user, where I pull the first chunk of the list (which is often the whole list) into memory and then filter it down.

But that’s not all

But DWTS isn’t the only list that the Halloween Tag came from. At one point, one of the generic Spotify-generated lists included that song, as well. So focusing too much on DWTS may not be the right move. And while I may be totally off-base and everyone else thinks “Candyman” qualifies as a Halloween song, plenty of other examples seem pretty suspicious.

So maybe the answer is to go through the Halloween songs and just clear that tag from anything that doesn’t seem particularly Halloweeny. What do you think? My general bias has been to pull in more songs and tags to give as broad a base as I can for browsing for ideas, then leave it as an exercise for you to do that last level of filtering. But in some cases (quite possibly this one) the signal can be drowned out by the noise.

Indexing on number of Halloween Votes

One possible mitigation is to index on the number of Halloween votes and default the sort to that rather than the dance votes. I could do something similar for Holidays. This would cause a combinatorial explosion if I indexed all tags, but I could probably do it for Halloween and Holiday (and maybe a few other interesting ones).

What now?

It’s too late for me to make major changes to the code before Halloween (especially far enough before Halloween to help people trying to put together playlists for Halloween dances). And I’m going to leave the specific catalog asks for the step of the month. But I would like your input on some broader questions that stem from the above, so please feel free to respond to this post or use any method listed on the feedback page to answer any or all of the following questions.

• Should I remap DWTS “Halloween” songs to “Halloween Night” and exude them from the Halloween pages?
• While I’m on DWTS, do you find these entries useful? Would you like me to do more complete cataloging of DWTS entries, or pull back further?
• Do you think I’m pulling in too much? Would you prefer a smaller, more highly curated catalog than what I’m doing now?
• If you read the aside, should I expand the Dance Vote per-user filter to include tag per user? e.g., let me search for all songs that DWTS tagged as “Halloween” and not pick up songs that DWTS contributed to in some other way, or that a different user tagged as “Halloween.”
• Can you think of anything else I could do to improve the Halloween or Holiday catalogs? There might still be time to improve the Holiday catalog [link] for this season.

Step of the Month

The  “Step of the Month” for October is to help out with the Halloween catalog. There are several ways to do this: you can add the Halloween Tag to songs that don’t have it and should, you can remove the Halloween Tag from songs that do have it and shouldn’t, or you can add new Halloween songs (I will also accept lists of songs if that’s easier – in that case, please reach out for details on accepted format).