[Music] Tag Music

[user-removed]

It'd be awesome to be able to add my own tags to all of my songs in playlists, so I can easily and specifically sort my songs how I like.

Should be a pretty simple tool to implement.

Thanks

[skrutm]

About new, more advanced features: rating, genre, additional/custom properties, etc. Since I don’t think that you want to implement so advanced functionalities because it might confuse users and can fill up user interface with unwanted information, I came up with another idea.

I find this idea very powerful, easy to implement, un-invasive to users (they can use it or not, if not UI stays the same as it is now), very flexible and it covers a lot of functionalities.

This idea is to add “smart tags” / “autocomplete tags” to the songs, albums. With “smart tags” I mean that they are not just one word, but hierarchically assembled tags and sub tags (like namespaces).

For example:
- Genre.Rock
- Genre.Pop
- Genre.Jazz.Smooth
- Genre.Jazz.Vocal
- Genre.Jazz.Latin
- Country.France
- Country.Spain
- Rating.5
- Rating.xxxxx
- Rating.xx
- Tempo.Slow
- Mood.Mellow
- Rythem.Waltz
- Rythem.ChaChaCha
- Rythem. Foxtrot
- Decade.70s
- Decade.80s
- Listened.Yer or just Listened
- ….

Everybody can define their own tags, or not. You just need to implement one additional field for songs and albums.
Essential is to provide autocomplete when user enters tags (distinct select of all tags user has entered so far and send them to the client).
Tags defined at album level are valid for all song and can be overridden at song level.
Bulk operations should be possible. Selecting more songs and set tags for all of them at once.
Automatic/filtered playlists can be easily defined just by selection of tags; wildcards should be possible. For example:
- Genre.Pop, Country.France, Tempo.Slow, Rating.xxxx*
- Country.Caribian.Cuba, Rythem.Salsa
- …

User can define their own Tag Columns. He enters prefix of a tag (Genre) and the rest is shown in column for all songs (Pop, Rock, Jazz.Smooth, Jazz.Vocal)

Although, I see two problems:

- If tags are not standardized, you can’t benefit from other users effort/tags. For example average rating, what genre a song belongs to. If 100 users entered that a song is VocalJazz, one should be able to accept that, he doesn’t need to enter that by himself.
Solution: you can provide standard tags and user can decide in settings which he will use. You print out in grey the most commonly used value at autocomplete level (like searching with google).

- Entering all this tags can be difficult, you can help user with autocomplete, combo boxes or popup with all tags listed (grouped by first word) and he can just check relevant ones. For example:
-------------------------------
Genre
[ ] Pop [] Rock [ ] Latin [x] Jazz.Smooth

Rating
[ ] 1 [ ] 2 [ ] 3 [ ] 4 [x] 5

Country
[x] France [ ] Spain [ ] Cuba
--------------------------------

If there are more than 10 entries for a group, combo box can be used.
You can pre-select some values according to the average in the database.
A button can be present for “Accept average values”. Also main groups can have checkboxes and just values for selected groups would be accepted. For example.
[x] Genre [ ] Rating [x] Country -> “Accept average rating” -> Genre.____ and Country.___ tags would be accepted.

This is mostly relevant for bulk operations when user wants to set Tags for many song

I believe this tool is so simple and so flexible that users can use it extensively or they don’t use it at all and nothing changes for them. I think this can give you competitive advantage to other music libraries. The market is still growing and users that would start to use your services now won’t change it quickly, because of all the playlists they created and songs that they organized and taged. More data they enter, more difficult it would be for them to change the provider. 🙂 And sharing information among users would give your services even more added value.

You can also base your recomendation engine on this huge date warehouse, provided by users.

[Liam]

I moved your topic to the ideas forum and therefore converted it to an idea 🙂

Liam

[Marco]

skrutm - I've moved your topic over here in the right topic about tagging music, so it doesn't get lost. 😉

[skrutm]

Essential is:

- allowing wildchars when filtering,

- cascading tags Author -> Album -> Song,

- pre-defined tags (rating, genre, rythem,...) so that other can benefit from what others have entered .

- bulk operations.

[mechanesthesia]

Please add this!  This along with smart playlists would be awesome!!!  I like to 

[mechanesthesia]

Please add this!  This along with smart playlists would be awesome!!!  I like to tag songs by a particular style, genre, mood, or context like "high school favorites," and then create a smart playlist with this would be awesome!

[StevenC4]

I agree.  For a good deal of my music, I like to organize albums into their own playlists and organize those playlists in playlist folders by artist.  Some artists have different styles in different albums, and I'd like to be able to give two albums the same tag so that I can filter by the tag and listen to all the songs with the same tag instead of having to put them into a whole new playlist.  If I were to create a playlist for every possible combination of albums and songs I want to listen to, there would be too many to manage, even with the new playlist folders to organize them all.  Tags would be a very welcome feature, and having a knowledge of application development, I don't believe this would be a very hard feature for your programmers to implement.  They are already making leaps and bounds with each new release of Spotify!  Way to go guys, this is just my suggestion for improvement.

[Perosales]

In my opinion, this addition would for the biggest part fix the missing stars issue for me.

Hear me out:

I would only add my absolute favorite music (songs and sometimes albums) to My Music... but would still be able to quickly create a playlist when I sort on TAG.

For example: 

All My Music with tag "ROAD MUSIC", "EIGHTIES", "SINGER-SONGWRITER" or even by mood: "EVENING DINNER".

And drag it to a playlist.

"My music" is good for sorting by artist or album... a great improvement... but not all music is for all moments. I know... we can use the browse function by mood, but sometimes you're not looking for surprises, but want to hear only a specific part of your own collection. Tags can divide your collection very easily.

[dunkinthejunk]

This feature would be the perfect addition to the new features of the latest version of Spotify!

I love the new feature and library idea of saving albums with one click.

Then I'm able to sort my songs by album, artist or "time added".

BUT! imagine if I could tag my songs with for example "chill", "summer", "hip hop".

Then I would be able to filter my songs in what mood i'm in.

If i'm in a mood of some chill hiphop I just choose those tags. Or all kinds of chill music then I just choose "chill" and BOOM I have my playlist.

This is the 21st century of playlist.

[skrutm]

Perosales we are tottaly on the same page here. They all put so much effort in recomendation engines, but to be honest, I like max 10% of the music recomended to me. It just doesn't work for me.

In every situation I like to listen to the best music available. Not just any recomendations... Shifting songs among playlists is nightmare for me. I just want to label the music and I want the rest to happen automaticaly.

... and it is not to hard to implement.