I wanted to know how I can submit changes to Artists, Titles and Album Names. For example, Watermelon Sugar is by Harry Styles, not One Direction. Etc. Thanks.
Thanks for joining the forum, Shawn.
Can you point to a playlist and spin in Spinitron that’s incorrect and identify the recording you actually played?
I know of the Harry Styles example. Ariana Grande 7 Rings has the wrong album (It’s Thank You Next, not 7 Rings). I can report each one as I see it if there was a way to do that.
Wrong album titles (and record label names) are sadly quite frequent with automatic content recognition and, even worse, there’s pretty much nothing that can fix it.
ACRCloud gets its data from a number of partners in digital music supply including streaming services, labels and distributors. It’s an automated process involving millions of recordings each with associated metadata. The problem is that any given music sound recording can appear many times in upstream data feeds. ACRCloud can deduplicate information about the same releases from different sources but not when the same song legitimately appears in multiple releases. In that case the technology has no way to know which of them you’re playing. So their algorithms (that I don’t udnerstand) just pick one.
I wish there were a better answer but the problem seems fundamental. You can play the game yourself. You recognize it when I play Dolly Parton’s recording of I Will Always Love You. But if I ask you what album I played it from…
Maybe there’s a way to agree the canonical release to which any give song belongs and then if that were in a database, maybe we could incorporate it into our system. Any ideas?
The problem becomes that sometimes artist give up royalties on songs given to (for example) a charitable compilation and sometimes it is a slightly modified version. That seems to be the only reason to care which CD the track came from. It may matter for mechanicals as well if they are ever waived.
Also, different names for some albums in different countries, so if you are playing the import or not (not likely for Ariana Grande but generally for the issue of canonical)
A “canonical album” database could not solve the problem, even if there could be consensus on what canonical means, it could at best reduce the number of edits the scrupulously careful DJ needs to make.
This has always confused me. From the point of view of the musical work, the PROs make no such distinction do they? And from the point of view of SoundExchange, they just want the ISRC. Now, I wouldn’t think that a new ISRC is assigned every time the recording is released, otherwise it wouldn’t really be a recording code would it?
My understanding is that if you donate a song to a charity compilation, the charity gets the mechanicals on the discs sold, and performance royalties on radio plays sourced from the disc (hence why they are happy to send us the discs). I assume the ISRC on the tracks are different, I don’t actually have anything that show me the ISRC so I may be talking out my butt again.
Sound recordings performances aren’t involved in either of those royalties. And for radio performance royalties the PROs only need the composer and title.
So I remain inclined to think that which album is logged in the playlist usually won’t make a difference to royalty payments.
Our streaming service uses ACR Cloud and can recognize and populate composer names. Can Spinitron now do this as well? (please say yes 
)
Right now we don’t do it. I’m looking to see how easy it might be to add this.
@Dominique_Johnson This is implemented now and appears to work at the technical level.
But I don’t know how useful it will turn out to be for you. Please let us know when you’ve had some experience.
What I’ve noticed is that ACR frequently attributes well-known songs to what seem like quite bizarre and uncommon album titles and record labels. For example - a song by Popular Artist XYZ which appears on XYZ’s Greatest Hits on some major U.S. label like RCA or MCA/Universal will be attributable to some mysterious compilation like Rock Hits of the 80s on a label I have NEVER heard of, or to a European record label. I realize that music licensing is world wide, and I’m guessing a lot of music companies are licensing older songs to all sorts of compilations that are streaming only (not conventional albums as I’ve known them), but it sure ends up with strange listings. (And I wonder how SoundExchange feels when stuff that’s on well-known record labels ends up attributed to some foreign label.)
I tell my programmers that it’s their option to go in and correct the listing to reflect the actual album title and record label they’re playing the track from. I do it occasionally for my own programs. But I figure that assuming the ACR database is accurate, our station has done its due diligence by relying on ACR’s identification of the track.
I really just wonder how ACR ends up attributable so many tracks to albums and record labels that are a far cry from the one 90% of American listeners would be familiar with.
I realize there’s nothing Spinitron can do about this, and overall we are having great success with ACR.
Hi Steve, this topic is “Fixing Errors in ACRCloud Title/Artist”, not album/label.
The album/label problem is mentioned in DJ guide to music recognition. I think we’ve discussed it elsewhere too.
Hi. So, I somewhat consistently get a message saying “ISRC cannot be blank”, even though the field is clearly not blank. A good portion of my song plays are not being recorded by Spinitron.
jmz Same As It Ever Was! Groovement KRSM Radio, 98.9 FM Minneapolis
Hi @Apollolypstic, I don’t think DJs should be expected to type ISRCs into the playlist entry form. I suggest you ask station management about the setting in Spinitron (Admin: Playlist Forms: Music Fields) that means yo have to fill the field.
The second thing looks like a bug, if the ISRC field is not empty then Spinitron should not complain that it is. It may take a while to fix that so I disabled the requirement for ISRC to let you proceed.
Thank you! Will check out the settings.
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