How do I scrobble this?

[06-06-2026]

This is a continuation of my previous post which talked about the band Boris and the problems they cause me to consistently tag metadata in my music collection and track my listening stats on last.fm. While in my Boris post I talked mostly about different variations of tracks and albums, another frequent problem I run into are collaborations of multiple artists. Another problem that affects Boris, but it wasn't something that had come up in my first post.

The first thing I want to establish is that I do treat remixes differently than I do alternative song versions. To briefly recap a point from my last post, I don't keep things like "(acoustic)", "(live)", or "(radio edit)" in the song title metadata tag of a song, because, for once, "(acoustic)" is not the name of the song, and most importantly, they are versions of the same song and I want all listens of those versions to be credited to the original song, rather than have my scrobbles be split up between different versions of the same song. Remixes though I think are different, and the reason for that is that I think remixes more often than not are their own independent composition. I never quite understood why remixes are treated the way they are: Why is it that so often you see "Artist A - Song title (Artist B remix)", but then you listen to it, and it's a completely new song that simply just samples the hook of the original song. I don't have insight into the history, culture and conventions of electronic music production, but it does seem odd to me. I don't think this should be treated as just another version of the original song, why doesn't the remix artist get more credit? From what I can tell, that's their own original song, using a sample doesn't take away from that, but the remix is still released through the original artist with them listed in the artist tag. Is this just to get around the murky legal grey area of copyright law and sampling?

Anyways, this isn't what this post is about. I just wanted to establish that my tags differentiate "Artist A - Song title" and "Artist A - Song title (Artist B remix)", differently to other alternative versions. That being said, I do run into a problem here with Nine Inch Nails' remix albums, which have the tendency to leave the remixes unnamed. It lists in the credits who made the remix, but they don't give the names as title to the remix. My previous example assumes that "Artist A - Song title (Artist B remix)" is the official title that the track is given, and that it's consistently called that across different formats and platforms. This means that if the CD cover, or the official YouTube upload, don't title the remix in this format, I no longer consider that the official title of the track. I don't wanna make up titles for remixes, even if simply calling it "(Artist B remix)" would probably be accurate contentwise, I would want to find an official source that labels these tracks as such. Therefore, I once again just have these go by their original song titles, which means that a single listen of NIN's critically acclaimed remix album Things Falling Apart gives me three scrobbles for Starfuckers, Inc.

This leads me back to collaborations proper. There are two main ways in which artists can collaborate on tracks. The most common is "Artist A - Song title (feat. Artist B)". I would remove the "(feat. Artist B)" here, because that is background information to the creation of the song and not part of the title, and it is a song by Artist A. My reason for removing this information is firstly, similarly to the "(Acoustic)" example, "(feat. Artist B)" is not actually the title of the song. Secondly, songs have all sorts of different collaborators all the time that would be listed in the credits, but that doesn't make them the artist of the song. I don't want to list every studio musician or producer that showed up during the recording, and I'm not listing a feature either just because now the musician in question is famous. To me, listing a song as "(feat. Artist B)" is mostly a marketing gimmick, because if it was about giving credit, studio musicians would need to be listed in the title of the YouTube video, too. The other main way of collaboration is "Artist A & Artist B - Song title". This is a song released by both artists considered as the main artist and would therefore also be listed as part of both artists' discography. For a long time I thought I was insane for trying to make a distinction between these two cases, but recently I've seen Mic the Snare do the same thing, which was a relief. Phew, I'm normal. Now, I can continue my extended blog post on my metadata standards in peace.

Telling both of these types apart can be difficult, because the way songs are listed is often highly inconsistent between different platforms. Looking at the song's album artwork is often also no help, as the artwork is subject to the designer's artistic freedom and may do whatever it wants with its text formatting. You may be lucky, and it's done very consistently. You may also be lucky and find external information that confirms how a release is treated by each artist involved. For example, on the Wikipedia page for the album Bloodmoon: I, it reads "the tenth studio album by American metalcore band Converge, and seventh studio album and collaborative studio album with Chelsea Wolfe". This clearly means that Converge and Chelsea Wolfe have an equal level of importance in the creation and attribution of the album, therefore, I tag the artist field for this album as "Converge & Chelsea Wolfe". I don't want to just label it as a Converge album, because it's just as much a Chelsea Wolfe album.

This is good, but leads to one obvious problem: Scrobbling the album now means that on last.fm it starts tracking the stats not for the artist Converge, not for the artist Chelsea Wolfe, but for a whole new, separate artist, Converge & Chelsea Wolfe, and as a result, listening to this album would not show up in my listening stats for Converge, and if you were to check my Converge stats, it would look like I never listened to Bloodmoon: I, unless you happen to get the idea to specifically look up my listening stats for Converge & Chelsea Wolfe also. Because of this, when deciding on how to treat the artist tag for any given collaboration, I tend to err on the side of the first case. If in doubt, just take the first listed artist as the song or album artist, and remove the second. I only add both to the artist field if I have concrete proof that a release is consistently equally credited to both artists and appears in equal importance in both artist's discographies. The other reason I tend to err on that side is because I want to avoid spamming the last.fm database with too many artist entries that no one but me uses. Last.fm does not support multiple artists per track, so any time you scrobble a track that has two artists in the metadata, it treats the combination of those two artists as its own, new artist. Having to remove info from a track always bothers me a little, though. It leads to an incomplete picture of what track you're actually looking at. I've recently started moving this bracketed extra information into the comment-field in the metadata, but there you only see it when you go out of your way to look for it in your own files, and it's completely lost once the stats are transferred to last.fm, so it's not actively useful for anything except for me keeping my peace of mind.

A feasible solution to at least part of the problem that I would love to see is if last.fm added support for multiple artists on one release. Metadata on audio files does not support this either, as there is only one field to type in an artist's name, but I think the way last.fm could implement this for at least equal collaborations would be through allowing users to link multiple artist pages together. Just as any user can edit an artists' wiki page, users could add a flag to an artist page that marks it as the page for a collaboration and the option to add links to the involved artist's main pages. This way, the stats from the collaborative release could easily be included with your stats on the main artist, either by simply listing the album with Chelsea Wolfe among all the other Converge albums, or by adding a separate section for related projects that displays below the stats for the artist.

Having learned how to work with cataloguing standards in library systems such as RDA, I am amazed at how the mechanics professional cataloguing systems provide solve basically every problem I have with tagging my music. RDA allows for any amount of contributors on a piece of media, and you can even assign a role to them. For example, when tagging the metadata, you could have something like "!Converge!#artist; !Chelsea Wolfe!#artist". For my Nine Inch Nails example, a song could be tagged with "!Nine Inch Nails!#artist; !Adrian Sherwood!#remixer", so that the information that the song in question is a remix is not lost, but you're not required to make up a new title for it if none is given by the original album. A feature could be "!Artist 1!#artist; !Artist 2!#feature", and each of these entries link back to the artist's main page because they're separate fields that data can be written into. How it's then displayed on the interface is up to its designer, you could individually choose to display certain information and not other, but the data is all there and can be processed.

RDA even differentiates between the presentation-format and the standardized format. The examples from the previous paragraph would be the standardized format, the way the data is stored, but if, for example on the cover art, the artist's names are written out in a specific way, that could be used to list the release, so that the way the digital copy is listed matches the writing on the album cover. For example, if on the cover it says "The Ex + Tom Cora", you could have the metadata something along the lines of "The Ex + Tom Cora[!The Ex!#artist; !Tom Cora!#artist]", so that it's displayed as "The Ex + Tom Cora", but the metadata links back to both The Ex and Tom Cora separately. This could of course also be used for artists whose collaboration goes by its own name: "Minuteflag[!Minutemen!#artist; !Black Flag!#artist]", displayed correctly as just "Minuteflag", but it could show up when you look for Minutemen because it has this link in the metadata. This of course could also solves many of my old Boris problems, like songs being known under different spelling conventions. You could have a standardized dataset for each song, but with different variants of spelling it that link together into the same dataset. This way you could display a title accurately to how it is listed on the CD, but have it redirect to the standardized dataset that covers all variations of the song, such as "Statement[!メッセージ!]", so that the song on the US version of Smile can show up with the accurate name for the US version, Statement, but the scrobbles would be credited to メッセージ.

Discogs already has a version of this that allows adding multiple contributors and interlinked aliases, so at least part of the music cataloguing community is already familiar with some of these concepts. I am aware that I can't reasonably expect for the average person to take an extended training session to learn the RDA cataloguing standard just to listen to music, though. But yet I can't help dream of a system that solves all my autistic qualms. Ultimately, with the systems that are available in audio file metadata and last.fm, I have to come to terms with the fact that I will never figure out a standard for myself that takes every circumstance into account and is able to treat every situation in a consistent manner. No matter how hard I try to find a consistent standard and how much I'm bothered by it, I'm gonna have to make compromises and decide on a case-by-case-basis every so often.