Last.fm needs to fix the disambiguation problem
I’ve been a user of last.fm for a while - most of the time it’s a great way of getting to hear new music. It works by ’scrobbling’ whatever music you’ve been listening to on your computer, and then allows you to stream a personalised internet radio station with songs similar to the sorts of things you’ve been listening. I’ve discovered several bands, including Pineapple Thief and Alestorm
Unfortunately there’s one big thing wrong with it. They’ve made a major database design screwup, in which they defined the unique identifier for an artist as being the artist name. This may work perfectly well for major label artists, but once you get into the “long tail” it’s more common to find multiple bands sharing the same name, often for bands in different countries, or bands sharing the same name as a long-defunct outfit. This has now happened to Panic Room, who now find themselves sharing a last.fm page with an Italian nu-metal band.
Last.fm’s hopelessly broken solution is to treat multiple artists as if they were one, and all the songs and photos are jumbled up with no indication as to which ones belong to which band. Sometimes one band is vastly more well-known than the other, so it doesn’t matter except for the other band which gets marginalised. But when you get two very different artists of roughly similar popularity, it creates a lot of animosity, with energy wasted in pissing contests between fans of the two bands over who’s first in the wiki, who’s photo is shown first, etc.
Last.fm have got to get their finger out and fix this - and I’m sick and tired of hearing excuses as to why it can’t be done. I work in IT, I’ve got a lot of database design experience - I know full well that they’re bullshitting when they say it’s “impossible”. If it requires a major database redesign, then so be it. They really can’t afford not to.
Even if the fix isn’t perfect, and might take some sort of manual intervention to determine which ‘new’ tracks belong to which band, anything is preferable to the present mess. I’m sure find fans will be prepared to spend time and energy if there’s any manual disambiguation required.
If last.fm doesn’t fix this, and fix this soon, then people are going to be abandoning last.fm for rival sites.
