It would be good to have copyright information of the artists. If any provide their music under a libre/free license (CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) that would make it attractive to developers to use.
Some folks also want to search for artists to invite to shows, so being able to filter by location might be beneficial.
[–] ferrarosimone 1 day ago
[–] abetusk 18 hours ago
Soundcloud occasionally has copyright information tied to an individual track. Bandcamp has a structured field that lists the copyright.
A long time ago, I scraped Bandcamp metadata and put it in a SQLlite file [0]. From that you can filter on bands by copyright (among other things).
Maybe a stripped down LLM could handle the free form text and figure out licensing issues. It looks like your list is pretty reasonably sized, so that might not be such a big job.
[–] ferrarosimone 16 hours ago
On the LLM idea: I thought the same to be honest, but the problem on Discogs is less fetching and structuring the free text and more that the info is rarely there. I launched an LLM to check and Creative Commons is there on about 1 release in 10,000, so there isn't much to rely on.
[–] abetusk 13 hours ago
All major search engines index Bandcamp, so I'm not sure they really can justify shutting down everyone else.
From what I remember, about 1% to 5% of artists or songs on bandcamp had libre/free (CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) terms. I would guess that the most likely reason it's so high compared with your number is that Bandcamp has a dropdown option, essentially, so they make it easy for bands to provide alternate licensing terms. Any libre/free licensing is going to be pretty niche and the people that care about such things is also niche, so I hear you that it's a lot of work for a very small payoff.
Consider the data set size, I was, at one point, considering just downloading all libre/free data, including songs, to avoid bit rot. Maybe I still will.
Doing a quick search with that data set I linked to, I see a couple dozen dub techno bands that are libre/free licensed.
Anyway, keep up the good work. I personally enjoy dub techno very much. I don't think I've ever met anyone offline who also likes it so it's nice to see other people who are passionate about it.
Just to clarify, the CC0 part is about the Discogs data (credits, labels, releases), not the music itself. Dub Digger doesn't host any audio, the previews come from Apple.
Your points are really good and I agree it would be super useful finding a way to add those info. So I checked the dump straight away.
Long story short, there is a field for who owns the copyright, but nothing about licences.
CC licencing only shows up in a patchy way in free-text fields. It means it's not standardised in any way (no consistency, no structure...). That makes it impossible to filter on it decently.
Location is the same story: there's no location field for artists, only free text in some profiles.
Release country is there, the problem is that it's the country of release and it's not necessarily linked to where the artist is based.
I'm keeping on digging the issue, though!