Summary

Add support in back-end for user to tag music they listen to and synchronize those tags with MusicBrainz recording tags.

Background

Music is a powerful tool to understanding culture and psychology. Imagine if instead of just "liking" a song, you could tag it with an emotion, like "This makes me… [happy, sad, excited, thoughtful, etc]". This data allows for deeper understanding of music listening habits and also allow us to build smart algorithms for recommending new music from a network graph of similar, tagged music.

From a research point of view, this metadata would be fascinating to work with.

Details

First, to prevent duplicating data, this feature should work with tags on MusicBrainz recordings, so tags are synced from that artist to ListenBrainz. If a user adds a tag, it's important to look up the tags a specific user has added to a recording too. I also see this as a helpful way to promote and use an underutilized MusicBrainz feature.

I see this more than telling the user to add tags of their own. I want us to ask and prompt the user with specific categories / buckets of tags to add. The user might be asked one of these questions and be presented with a small list of options.

• How did this make you feel?
• What emotion would you describe this song as?
• etc…

Outcome

If implemented, this would ideally make the data pool for music listening more rich for research or creating recommendation algorithms. Additionally, it also supports a feature of MusicBrainz too. This should increase ListenBrainz's awesomeness as a project for data researchers.