Who chooses what genre a particular album falls into?
We retrieve our base information from the freedb.org online CD database. This service has collected the details of over 1.5 million CDs (and that collection is still growing). They are able to collect this information because other software applications take data that users enter and send it back to the central database. This is good because it allows the data to be up to date. This is not so good because effectively anyone can enter the information into that database. Note that we said this is the basis for our own database. Over time we are correcting some of this information (we submit those corrections back to the freedb.org database) and once we’ve corrected an item we no longer use the freedb info. The one area where it’s hardest for us to correct is genre – because that’s subjective info.
We retrieve our base information from the freedb.org online CD database. This service has collected the details of over 1.5 million CDs (and that collection is still growing). They are able to collect this information because other software applications take data that users enter and send it back to the central database. This is good because it allows the data to be up to date. This is not so good because effectively anyone can enter the information into that database. Note that we said this is the basis for our own database. Over time we are correcting some of this information (we submit those corrections back to the freedb.org database) and once we’ve corrected an item we no longer use the freedb info. The one area where it’s hardest for us to correct is genre – because that’s subjective info. To an afficianado thrash metal is as different from heavy metal as Bach is from Beethoven – to others it’s all heavy metal (and to those less diverse in their tastes it’s just noise – but that’
