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Topic: CD Albums: Time To Bite The Bullet Pt. 1 The Problem

20th May 2017, 1:36 AM
	Lee Wrecker If you can't dig me, you can't dig nothin' Member since Nov 2013 2283 Points	I think it's time to have a good hard look at CD Albums World and work on some ways to improve it. As difficult as it may be I think this world needs a complete overhaul. I've watched the number of entries over the past month and have noted that they're slow coming in compared to other areas of the site and amount to about half as many as the LPs area of the site. Surely, given that CDs have been the main source of marketed music in the past 30 years the slow number of entries here on the site should tell us something is wrong. So, I'll start with the artist homepages and work through some other issues till we get to the dreaded international category. Quite simply the homepages are a mess and extremely difficult navigate or find particular CDs. This mainly due to two things. Firstly, the listings are reversed chronologically to present the most recent releases first and secondly there are no divisions between countries or regions. Everything from everywhere is situated in one long list from most recent to oldest. Have a look at The Beatles page to see what I mean. It's not till page 4 here that a copy of Abbey Road appears. Perhaps we need to reconsider this layout and put in country/region divisions before the homepages become completely unmanageable. Or list albums in chronological or catalogical order as per the artist so the pages have some logical sequence. Many of you may know that I have misgivings about the accuracy of the Discogs site but their homepages are much better organised and easy to use than what we are currently doing in CD albums world. Could we borrow some ideas from there? User entries in CD Albums are still relatively slow and I put this down to the difficulty of the entry process. Not that it is hard to enter a CD it is in fact quite easy but it is however hard to get it right. What I'm driving at here is the problems that the international category causes for those posting CDs. This issue has seen many members desert the CD Albums section of the site after entering a small sample of their collections. The main problem here stems from the fact that a poster can correctly enter a CD as per the details at hand but then find their good work has been altered due to the impenetrable logic that is associated with the international category. Here we have two completely opposite interpretations of the guidelines running concurrently and depending on who moderates the entries or comments on it no matter what you have done it is wrong. In general I believe that most people don't like being told that they're wrong or having their hard work changed for some arbitrary reasons that often defy logic. The common answer to this problem on the site is along the lines of "bash it in and we'll sort it out later" but this attitude is not one that catters like. They like more certainty about what they're doing and the exodus of many from CD Albums is testimony to that. So there is definitely a problem. To explain what the problem is though we need to examine our guidelines and there are two ways CDs can be made international on the site and neither are adequate. Here's a summary of the methods in use the "identical" CD is in short Same CD + Multiple Markets = International and the other is matching barcodes Matching Barcodes + Different Countries/Regions = International Same CD + Multiple Markets = International is very difficult to prove for catters outside the market of manufacture. In Australia for instance I would hazard a guess that roughly 60-70% of mainstream releases have been available here over time. To further complicate things if a release has been successful a local copy may also be produced. Sometime with the same "identical" details and sometimes not. So is one CD an Australian CD for that market: yes. Is the other a USA or EU release: yes. Are they all international: yes. Are they in fact "identical: no. Here's my apparently globetrotting Australian CD of the Beastie Boys that still has no matches on the site. Conversely here's my copy of the Buzzcocks Chronology which has an identical UK equivalent but is listed as Australian. Surely, both should be one or the other? See Pt. 2 Where to From Here Edited by Lee Wrecker on 20th May 2017, 2:25 AM