[mihular]

I recently made a transition from Spotify to Tidal and found the suggested transfer service to do the job really clumsy. In my case I've transferred favorite artists and the service was just trying to match them by name which failed miserably when there was more than one with the same name - seemingly it picked one randomly. I wonder how this service would do.

[etra0]

I recently made the switch as well and used spotify_to_tidal [1] which is the free and open-source alternative to what Tidal recommends and it worked pretty fine! it couldn't find some specific tracks and I bet it does a somewhat similar name match as the one Tidal recommends, but at least this one doesn't have a limitation by the number of tracks, in case it's useful to someone else.

[1] https://github.com/spotify2tidal/spotify_to_tidal

[dylan604]

other than name match, what exactly do you expect them to attempt to do? use a shazam like process to analyze each potential match?

[aaronax]

Use the Spotify artist ID[0] to find the Wikidata entry, and then grab the Tidal artist ID from the Wikidata entry to match the correct artist on Tidal. Even better if you use album IDs. (Brain explodes if you could use a song ID.)

Realistically, Wikidata may not have enough of this data populated, but it is nice to dream. And it seems plausible that MusicBrainz or similar might have enough data.

[0] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1902

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P4576

Edit: P1902 has 57000 uses and P4576 has 7000. So YMMV big time.

[dylan604]

Great, yet another attempt at solving this with yet another standard that not everyone will use. Why did you pick this attempt instead of something more common like Gracenote?

[aaronax]

Gracenote is owned by private equity and has limited availability of data. I prefer to encourage the use of more open data. MusicBrainz or Discogs would have been better choices than Wikidata based on quantity of entries. Though in 5 minutes I have been unable to find if Discogs even has external IDs, and I am not sure of the quantity of Spotify IDs that MusicBrainz has.

[dylan604]

Great that you want to use open sources, but now, you've just provided more evidence for my case as you've listed 2 new "sources of truth". Even that fact that there are plural truth sources indicates no one source is truth. Why are they different? Same reasons that have already been discussed

So, we really have not made any forward progress here

[mihular]

It could check the album names on both sides, for example. And in case of uncertainty, it could make a list of dubious matches. Stuff like that, I guess.

[dylan604]

The point is that it's all just metadata. There's a saying along the lines of "the filename is a really bad place to store metadata". Whether the title is the same and/or the album name as an additional qualifier, it's all subject to data entry which is prone to mistakes.

[mihular]

To some extent yes, but that data is usually sent from record label with the same values for different streaming services. But anyway, don't tell me that they can't at least figure out that there are more than one artists with the same name...

[notyourwork]

Record labels are actually quite terrible at providing this. You would assume otherwise because it’s in their best interest. However, I work in the industry and can tell you it’s a ridiculous problem because their is no standard and lots of human effort in cleanup and cleanliness.

[dylan604]

You'd think that, but not in my experience. It's not like they are getting ID3 tags populated by Gracenote or some such service. You're also assuming that the streaming platforms do not attempt to manipulate the metadata they received for their own internal policies. See my other comment in a sibling thread for specific examples.

Too much inside baseball experience with the data the studios/labels believe is perfect that when received is far from perfect leaving the individual platforms to deal with it.

[interestica]

Allll the other associated metadata is useful...

[dylan604]

You say that as if all metadata is the same. I can tell you it is not. Every company that uses metadata will at some point use a field differently from someone else. "The Album" => "Album, The" type of things. "Album" => "Album (YYYY)" types of things. "Track remix by Artist" => "Track" + "Producer" as different fields.

[iamacyborg]

My impression is that Tidal does a bad job of this in general. I have lots of artists I follow on there who have albums appearing on their page from identically named but different artists.

[mihular]

Don't get me started on that. How can a company which core business is content streaming be that lazy is beyond me. I often feedback them the errors, but even such feedback is difficult.

[notyourwork]

Sadly it’s an expensive scaling problem. Not trivial to solve at the scale streaming platforms operate at.

[mihular]

Well, at least they could make it easy to feedback, like a button on the artist/album page. But it's it really that hard to do it themselves? They are not getting a million albums per day, do they? I'm sure there are ways to improve the process with a little good will.

[iamacyborg]

Discogs seems to handle it just fine.