[Developers] Proposed changes in the music domain

[Christopher R. Maden]

Hello, developers!

If you care about data in the music domain, please take a moment to look 
at it on sandbox: <URL: http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/domain?id=/music >.

If you don’t care about the music domain, please skip the rest of this 
e-mail.

The main change here is the new “Composition” type, which has 
“Composer,” “Lyricist,” and “Recorded Versions” properties.  A “Song” is 
now just a kind of “Composition” (by way of an included type).

A composition can include another composition — so a symphony might 
include its movements, a rock opera can include its songs, an operatic 
cycle can include its operas.  These different semantically-meaningful 
types can be added as the data is fleshed out.

This would affect a couple of other domains, too; a musical would be 
both a “Play” and a “Composition,” with the composer and lyricist using 
the “Composition” properties and with its songs being compositions 
themselves included in the larger work; similarly for operas.  (I do 
realize that there is a connotative difference between a librettist and 
a lyricist, but that is more a matter of era than anything else; which 
does _Tommy_ have?)

Another new type is “Arrangement,” which is, like “Song,” itself a 
“Composition,” but which is also an arrangement of some other 
composition.  This allows us to distinguish between covers of Jimi 
Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” and Bob Dylan’s.

I am posting this same message to the discussion in the Music domain on 
the main Freebase site, <URL: 
http://www.freebase.com/discuss/view?id=/music#%239202a8c04000641f80000000051fcbc7 
 >; please reply with comments there.

Thanks,
Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden
Data Architect
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.
<URL: http://www.metaweb.com/ >