So I have iTunes. Could be some other MP3 software, doesn’t matter.
- Name of the tune
- Album it’s from
- Who’s performing it.
- Who wrote it.
Most folks (by which I mean, “people who create plug-ins for MP3 software to bring the play info over into a blog entry or something like that.” as well as, say, “people who write MP3 software”) would agree on #1-3. That’s the basics of what displays in the player itself in most cases, as well as what shows up in plugins for blogs (e.g., WMPtunelog, BlogTunes).
But the fourth item, who wrote it, gets short shrift.
That may make some sense in the world of pop music. After all, who pays attention to who wrote the latest bit from, say, the latest pop diva?
But that’s a very myopic view of music, IMO. And it falls apart on anything that’s more than ten or twenty years old (which, I realize, rules out probably 90% of the MP3 music listened to). First off, there are plenty of singer-songwriters out there in the 60s, 70s, etc., who it’s of value to recognize, even if someone else is covering their material. If Avril Lavigne is covering something by Bob Dylan, isn’t it nice to know that? Hell, isn’t that more important than the album name, as
far as that goes?
More importantly, though, in the areas of classical and soundtrack music, the Performer is secondary to the Composer. Joe-Bob Smith conducting the Hoboken Philharmonic is of secondary importance to knowing that the Symphony #3 in B-minor is by Mozart, vs. Handel. And is it more important to know that’s Suzy Creamcheese singing “Oh How I Do Love You” from the hit musical You Paid How Much to See This? or to know that the musical was written by Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice?
In other words, in geekspeak, the important data elements vary based on the type of music being listened to. The assumption that the composer is trivial is not only wrong, it’s insulting to songwriters and shortchanges the people using these tools.
(I encountered this during my use of the media tags in ecto during the Blogathon. I don’t usually include that sort of info when blogging, for a variety of reasons, but I found it as irksome this year as I did last.)