Discussions on Musical Track

I agree - the appropriate fields are available on Musical Album (recording engineer, producer) but not on Track. I wonder if there is a way to create an abstract Type that has fields for recording credits, that both could inherit from. There are other fields in common that are missing from Track as well, such as Release Date, Label, and Genre, so perhaps this would be good solution.

Hi, Chris. Often, a track or album has a download page whereat one can select a version of the track to download, or present payment before downloading. This seems to be more common and (IMO) more user-friendly than linking from the Freebase topic directly to the sound file.

I think for the general case, the link to an external resource which provides the download is useful. But it cannot play the role of an Atom or RSS enclosure. I'm not sure if there are implicit limits to the data Freebase is interested in indexing, but to the ability to "enclose" media files via direct links is standard in all the syndication formats. To properly import those feeds Freebase will need enclosure support. To provide accurate metadata, Freebase will need to be capable of linking some of those enclosures to Musical Tracks.

Thanks for asking, Doron. If you take a look at the bottom of that MusicBrainz page, you’ll see that the artist is Joss Whedon; the James Marsters credit is what MusicBrainz calls an “advanced relationship,” a contributing credit. That episode of Buffy was a musical; consider a single track from The Phantom of the Opera for comparison. The signer of a particular song is not really the recording artist; there is an orchestra and maybe a chorus, and it is part of a larger production. The artist might well be “The Original Broadway Cast of The Phantom of the Opera,” but is usually credited to the composer. This model is a challenge for classical and semi-classical music in general, but just crediting the singer doesn’t seem right. The entire “Once More, with Feeling” soundtrack should probably be credited to a musical group, “The Cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” if you feel like cleaning this up.

By the way, the Composition property on a track is meant to point to the song (or movement, or aria, etc.) of which the track is a recording, not the person who composed it. As intriguing as the notion is, I don’t think Joss Whedon is himself a musical composition.

thanks for clarifying that (i hope others who think what i thought, will see this post of urs).

although i am not really an expert in this subject, shouldn't be there a field for the main (if not all) lead singers? and also add properties for band members and such (which then can be written as London philharmonic or something...)

im not sure i understand what you said about the Composition Property, but i do believe that Joss Wheadon did write both music and lyrics of that song (if not for all or most other songs of Once more with feelings).

Doron, in short, Joss wrote the song—composed the composition—but he is not the song.

Absolutely right, Johannes. We are working on a continuous-update process which should be up and running for artists, albums, and tracks by the end of the year. We are trying to take the time to make sure it works correctly.

You could easily create such a schema in your own private domain ;)

What to call it though...Picturisation Performance? Bollywood is a generic name applied to 'masala' movies, but is that the best term? There are various regional Indian language-based film industries, all creating this type of film.

 It would have to include:

film, composers, lyricists, playback singers, actors, choreographers, type of performance (duet, group, crowd, solo?), musical style, dance style, length of performance, language (spoken), language (sung) and releases (eg music video collections,

What about just adding a "musical track" property to the film type itself? It seems to me that this value would apply not only to Bollywood films, but certainly also to movie musicals, and even to non-musicals, since soundtracks do not reliably contain all the songs that were played (either as part of the film or as background) in the movie.

As jeff pointed out, other movies can also benefit from the "musical track" property, which is what I was thinking about. But having a separate schema such as "Picturisation Performance" (or whatever) will allow us to capture more data about every such performance like the actors, choreographers, type of performance, etc. as mentioned above. 

There are already tons of such (bollywood) performances data using the standard "musical track" schema. Are there any tools for batch 'fixing'?

Also, how is data about music videos being captured currently? I did not find any schema for this data. Can both of these use a common schema? Eg: There is this Celine Dion's "My Heart Goes On" music video which has Celine singing and interspersed with Titanic movie clippings. So, the film Titanic needs to be connected to this music video, or not?

I just found "Music Video" schema through gordon's profile. I think it is still being developed.

I'm not sure what you mean about "picturisation performance". Are you looking for information about specific musical productions within a film?  We can capture film-wide information about choreographers, etc. currently (through the "other crew" property), but if a film has multiple choreographers, there is no way to say "choreographer A worked on scenes X, Y, and Z" and "choreographer B worked on scenes Q and R". Is that the level of detail you're looking for?