Re: Decibel

On Wed, 2014-03-26 at 12:15 +0000, Sophist wrote:
> On March 25, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Robert Kaye wrote:
> 
> > On Mar 25, 2014, at 2:08 PM, Sophist <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > > 5. They have apparently accumulated data about 15 million tracks on 1.1
> > > million albums by 300k artists (https://developer.decibel.net/ ) How 
> > > does
> > > that compare to MB?
> >
> > http://musicbrainz.org/statistics
> >
> > The numbers are amazingly similar, aren't they?
> 
> Very similar.
> 
> I have to admit that their description of how they "scrape their data" is 
> somewhat vague. On the one hand they are arguing that they have detailed, 
> accurate metadata, and on the other hand they are saying that they scrape 
> data from the internet (which IMO is not typically conducive to accuracy 
> without a LOT of sifting, filtering and cleaning).
> 
> MB has a large community of editors working tirelessly to get the data 
> accurate over more years than Decibel has been in existence, and yet Decibel 
> can achieve this in a couple of years with a handful of data gatherers.
> 
> It is a pity that their DB is not publicly available so as to see whether 
> they have the same minor data errors in their data as we have in ours 

They are currently offering access to their API for free to developers;
it probably wouldn't be hard to check on this if you can find someone
willing to agree to their API terms & conditions.

That said, they do explicitly state that they include MusicBrainz
release, track, and artist IDs as foreign IDs in their database - and
any database that's linked to MusicBrainz IDs is a good thing in my
view, if only because it promotes MusicBrainz a little. (Although it is
better if their data is public, of course!)

-- 
Calvin Walton <[email protected]>