Tag Archives: Artist

Searching for Music

New Feature: Improved Text Searching

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I’ve always been a bit dissatisfied with how I set up the Artist field in music4dance.  A free text field for the artist generally works, but it doesn’t capture everything I’d like.  But since the core functionality of music4dance is to associate songs with dance styles, keeping the rest of the system simple is a sound decision, and I stand by it.

However, something comes up every few years that makes me want to at least incrementally improve the text search part of the system.  When Prince left us, I broke down and created artist pages based on the text of the artist field.  This was a significant improvement, and I returned to that when writing my DWTS Taylor Swift/Whitney Houston post.  In that post, I listed a few things that I thought could be improved with artist search and then let things rattle around in my brain for a few months.

Last week, I decided to spend a little while seeing what I could do to make a worthwhile improvement in a short time.  What came out was a pair of changes.  The more visible change is an addition to the advanced search page. 

I’ve added some additional controls to explicitly search each of the three primary text fields in the music4dance database – Title, Artist, and Albums.  This enables a more direct way to get to all of the songs by an artist.  It also allows the inverse.  While adding the artist page let you get to all of the songs by “Prince,” it didn’t let you find all of the songs with “Prince” in the Title without also seeing the Prince and Prince Royce songs or, for that matter, songs with Prince in album names.  That is, if you can find one song with Prince as the artist you can click on the link to get to the artist page.

One side effect of this change is that if you search for Prince in the artist field, you also get Prince Royce songs, although they end up at the end of the list.  While that’s not great in the case of Prince, you now have a fast way to get to a link that will send you to the Prince artist page, which does only list Prince songs.  The good part of this quirk is that if you’re looking for songs by Benny Goodman, you’ll get a list containing not just songs with exactly “Benny Goodman” in the artist field.  You also get songs by “Benny Goodman Sextet,” “Benny Goodman Quartet,” “Benny Goodman and Charlie Christian,” “Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman,” etc.

The other more subtle improvement is that I dug into how the underlying database ranks the results of a search.  With my new understanding, I decided to weight the Title and Artist fields considerably higher than the other fields, including the Albums fields.  This helps more than one would think because I grab as many albums as I can associate with a song, and there may be a word in several of those album titles that doesn’t show up in the title or artist. Since the database uses the frequency of a word in the text as part of the weighting, those songs will show up high in the ranking, while it’s not obvious why that song showed up at all since you have to click through to the song details page to see the album names.

Give it a whirl and tell me what you think.  I will probably still do an artist index and possibly figure out a way to do some cleaning up of the database.  There are still songs where the title contains a featured artist, and that artist isn’t represented in the artist field at all, for instance.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

What are your favorite Prince songs for partner dancing?

I, like many, am mourning and listening to Prince’s music. Over and over again. Since I’ve been thinking a lot about music and partner dancing recently, this lead me to think about what I would dance to each song.  Especially when Leader of the Band popped up in my playlist and screamed Cha-Cha at me. …

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by msc4dnc

Ballroom Dancing to Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift

The recent Dancing With the Stars episodes featuring Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift’s music caused a significant spike in traffic at music4dance.net, with dancers looking for music by those artists. I find this exciting for many reasons.  There’s the obvious reason that more traffic means more people showing interest in this project.  It also reinforces…

Keep reading
by msc4dnc
Searching for Music

Ballroom Dancing to Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift

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The recent Dancing With the Stars episodes featuring Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift‘s music caused a significant spike in traffic at music4dance.net, with dancers looking for music by those artists.

I find this exciting for many reasons.  There’s the obvious reason that more traffic means more people showing interest in this project.  It also reinforces the idea that dancing to music you enjoy is good, even if it’s not exactly the music that co-evolved with the dance.  This is one of the reasons I started music4dance in the first place and one of the reasons that I continue to spend time on the site. Another reason I’m excited is that even without doing a push, as of this writing, 58 Taylor Swift and 37 Whitney Houston songs are tagged with some kind of dance in the music4dance catalog.

It also made me realize that I haven’t checked in on how well the site handles searching by artist in years.

Here’s a quick overview of what the site currently provides.

  • Do a general search for an artist’s name either from the search control in the title bar or from the main song library page
  • This will result in a list of songs, many of which have the artist you searched for listed in the artist field.
  • At that point, clicking on the artist’s name will take you to a list of songs that we’ve cataloged by that artist.

This generally works1, and a significant number of people are landing on the Taylor Swift and Whitney Houston pages, so I have to count that as a success.

There are also some significant drawbacks that I can see and likely plenty that I can’t.  So, I will generate a quick list here for your perusal.  Please respond with feedback if you find any of these particularly onerous or if there are issues not on this list that you find more annoying.

  • There is no way to get to a list of artists cataloged on music4dance, so you have to do a general search for artists to get to a link that will take you to the artist page.
  • The artist field is a general text field, so typos and variations creep in2.
  • The artist page is pretty sparse; it’s just a list of songs that contain the artist’s name in the artist field. There are probably other things that we could include on the page.

What do you think? Are these your top issues with how I’m handling artists? Or are there other things that you find more pressing? Let me know, either way.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback and read every comment and email. So please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or about the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

P.S. I’m working on getting out my annual holiday music post. Meanwhile, if you’re looking to put together a holiday playlist or searching for the perfect song for that holiday party exhibition piece, the posts from previous years should give you something to start with. Or you can just head to the holiday music page and see what you find.

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I, like many, am mourning and listening to Prince’s music. Over and over again. Since I’ve been thinking a lot about music and partner dancing recently, this lead me to think about what I would dance to each song.  Especially when Leader of the Band popped up in my playlist and screamed Cha-Cha at me. …

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  1. And – bonus – their names correctly autocomplete when you type them in the search box.  This seems like a simple thing that one would expect in any search box on any site, but it’s a pretty heavy lift to get working correctly. ↩︎
  2.  I intentionally de-emphasized the artist in my original site design.  The artist field is just a free text field that can contain anything.  That ends up being somewhat random, between what I’ve pulled from various sources and what users have entered.  In the case of Whitney Houston,  Hold Me is listed with Whitney Houston & Teddy Pendergrass as the artists.  This works all right since the Whitney Houston artist page is just a search for the keywords “Whitney Houston” in the artist field.  But in the case of Taylor Swift, there are several songs that are listed as “Feat. Taylor Swift” in the title and her name isn’t in the artist field at all.  So they wouldn’t show up on the Taylor Swift page.  The Joker and the Queen by Ed Sheeran is one example of this issue.  One fix to this is to do some cleaning up of the catalog and make sure that the featured artists show up in the artist field as well as (or instead of) the title field.  Another is to take a step back and build a more complex scheme, possibly leaning on something like musicbrainz.org to center more on artists. ↩︎