Tag Archives: Prince

Searching for Music

What Are Your Favorite Dolly Parton Songs for Partner Dancing?

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.

New Feature: Improved Text Searching

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…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

What are your favorite Prince songs for partner dancing?

Update 2024: The content of the post is still generally accurate. There is a more recent post that outlines a new feature that adds yet another way to narrow down songs that have “Prince” in the artist’s name. New Feature: Improved Text Searching I, like many, am mourning and listening to Prince’s music. Over and…

msc4dnc's avatar 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…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
Searching for Music

New Feature: Improved Text Searching

1 Comment

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?

Update 2024: The content of the post is still generally accurate. There is a more recent post that outlines a new feature that adds yet another way to narrow down songs that have “Prince” in the artist’s name. New Feature: Improved Text Searching I, like many, am mourning and listening to Prince’s music. Over and…

Keep reading
msc4dnc's avatar 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
msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
Music and Dance

What are your favorite Prince songs for partner dancing?

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Update 2024: The content of the post is still generally accurate. There is a more recent post that outlines a new feature that adds yet another way to narrow down songs that have “Prince” in the artist’s name. New Feature: Improved Text Searching

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.  Of course a lot of his seminal work has more of a blues feel that I would associate with West Coast Swing (or possibly even more directly blues dancing).  But there are certainly some things in his catalog that one might Quickstep to (Let’s Go Crazy) or dance a Slow Foxtrot (Strollin‘) to.

Here’s a link to the list of Price songs currently in the music4dance catalog.  If you’ve got other favorites (along with what you would dance to them) let me know by responding to this post or sending feedback and I’d be happy to add them.  Or sign in and vote on what style you would dance to the songs already in the catalog.

The Prince Feature

One of the things that I noticed as I was looking for Prince music in the music4dance catalog was that I hadn’t implemented an artist page of any kind.  You could search for Prince but you would both get everything I had catalog by Prince and everything by Prince Royce songs with Prince in the title.  So I did a quick fix – if you click an artist’s name you’ll be taken to a page with a list of the first 100 songs I’ve catalog by that artist.  Since I’m only tracking artist by the full name this has a couple of implications, one of which is that Leader of the Band won’t show up under Prince since the artist is actually “Sheila E. featuring Prince and The E Family.”

You can, of course, still search for Prince and manually go through the songs to find the ones that actually involve Prince, but that’s obviously not the perfect solution.  How much does this matter to you?  Is it important to have a more specific idea of artist when you’re sorting through songs to dance to?

As always, please send me feedback or just respond to this post with any issues or ideas.