Sunday, September 9, 2012

Respecting the music.

This radio station manager position that I picked up is going to quite the handful.

A lot of the music is mis-tagged, so Sarah McLachlan's 'Angel' shows up under the 'Rock' genre.
So I started tearing everything down and building it back up from the beginning.

So I have to go through each of our tracks and correctly tag them, but how to keep the tags useful?
I need to have a degree of specificity, so that if someone wants to play a rock playlist, they have access to purely rock tracks, but if someone wants more maroon 5 than zepplin, then they can do that (light rock versus 70s rock)

But each category still needs to be vague enough that whoever my DJs are don't have to fuss about between 'acid jazz' and  'crossover jazz' Especially because one thing I'm going to need them to do is actively edit the tags to the tracks, since I CANNOT do it all by myself.

Before I realized this whole tagging thing would be so much of an issue, I quadrupled our music library (something like 30,000 tracks, currently).


Another thing I've noticed is the trend of calling something 'oldies' or '20s' or '30s'
30s what? Because I know that there were different kinds of music in the 30s. There was Jazz, Blues, Swing, and Folk music. So I'm making it a point to respect music as an entity by properly tagging things and putting them into playlists based on musical stylings as opposed to age. (Fist bump to mah gurl Ella Fitzgerald)


Then not only do I need to clearly define rules to place which songs, where; I also need to adequately convey this to everyone I'm going to be working with!
So, I'm working on a graphical representation, and simply destroying notebooks from crumple-drafts.
I feel like I'm making a periodic table of music genres. Incidentally, the periodic table is my inspiration for this representation.

The periodic table is so incredibly well-devised. It's majestic. The number of different organizational paradigms filling up that graph is beautiful. (I've picked up an old habit of reading the dictionary before bed.)

Once I get this drafted, though, I am going to draw it up in Illustrator, and send it over to the Manufacturing department to get a 36"x44" printout. I'm using all the new things I'm learning in my new classes to tackle all of my new challenges.

There are SO MANY NEW CHALLENGES. I'm finding out that there are so many things I didn't know that I didn't know. And on top of that is that I have to get these things figured out and quashed in a reasonable time-frame, amidst all the other things calling out for my attention.


I'm also on the hunt for another turntable, and crossfader so that DJs can bring in and use some vinyl.


I'm discovering that documentation of music is as scarce as the genres of music, in that there is no one-stop-shop for music database information. Specifically, information about the genre and usability of a song based on profanity. Because we can't play anything that has profanity in it at all, due to the nature of our license.

So many things in life need an idiot button. But I'm glad that I'm taking the time and accepting the burden do things right. I want 'doing things right' to be synonymous with my name. Up until this point it's been more closely related to 'Knows what he's doing, but is disorganized and won't give things >70%'

My time to get known for being awesome is now. I have the perfect things in line to allow to springboard into grandeur. Now I just need to start paying the tab.

No comments:

Post a Comment