Cleaning Up last.fm Metadata

[Moozik: Zombie Girl - Symphony Of The Living Dead]

For a while now, the official last.fm scrobbling client has been utilizing audio fingerprinting to help identify the songs people are listening to. People are notoriously crap at tagging their music so relying on the ID3 tag results in less than stellar metadata. They posted a progress report today which I thought was interesting.

So far our fingerprint server identified 23 million unique tracks, from the 650 million fingerprint requests you’ve thrown at it. Who knows how many unique tracks there are out there.. We have a couple of hundred million tracks based on spelling alone – but not all of them are spelt (sic) correctly.

The Guns N' Roses issue highlights the tagging & spelling problem. Top 100 ways to write Guns N' Roses - Knockin' On Heaven's Door and some of the artist names used on Guns N' Roses tracks.

Of course if people tagged their songs correctly to begin with using a MusicBrainz enabled tagger then there wouldn't be a problem. I figure if you know enough to use last.fm and can explain what scrobbling is, you surely know how to tag your music correctly. Alas it appears the evidence shows the contrary. The majority of users must not be as anal as I am about their music collection ;-)