JUST KIDDING! ´cos so far, on Friday morning, there isn´t one.
Maybe the back office feels confident enough with the "re-launch" that they only need to do weekly updates now.
Or maybe, one month into this fiasco, everything is "going as planned," to paraphrase one poster here.
I don´t know about you, but reading the forum just makes me feel ill and "not right" with the state of the world today.
Plus there´s the fact that on the forum, it´s the same old story, maybe with different names, but with similar to same problems.
As someone else posted here: it might be nice to hear from Pony again. . .if he hasn´t been fired already.
With so little information coming out from the top, it´s difficult not to resist a kind of paranoid, pro-conspiratorial thinking when the Big Shot owners (CorinthianCap) of Discmakers and the Baby look like one of those mammothly funded asset strippers who come in with the bucks, re-tool everything, and make everything ready to turn over, with a gigantic profit, of course, to yet another group of "investors." We´ve seen it happen in the Wall Street economy many times before. I think we can presume that the Big Money guys indeed do not give a hoot about the CD Baby artist(s).
If Brian does post an announcement today, I´ll try to post it here as well. But at this point, anything from the top will just seem to feel anticlimactic. . .
Posts
Newspapers can be jerks
-
In my paper on the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), I examine
the history of newspapers’ hostile reception of new technologies and
competit...
1 week ago
You're right. Now if Pony was to post again - maybe we'd learn something. I don't imagine, though, Pony's candour was appreciated by upper management.
ReplyDeleteHis post was the one and only time that anyone at CD Baby acknowledged the reality that artists and customers are dealing with daily - the site was relaunched before it was ready. It's still not ready, and, it seems like people are becoming resigned to the fact there's much amiss at CD Baby. It now becomes a matter of exploring the alternatives, and weighing out the pros and cons of moving tracks/albums etc. Even the posts of CD Baby's customer service people seem to be less genuinely communicative, and just say, contact us by email, rather than getting into discussing matters on the forums.
The return of the hits counter, the old accounting features etc. have all been promised. Since we can't do anything but - it's now also a situation of waiting to see if the promises are delivered.
Search functionality seems a thing of the past - unless the database language can be rewritten as was outlined in detail by one post on the CD Baby forums.
back on July 27 "jde" posted this look at the search problems - I haven't been reading all the threads, suffering the same frustration and fatigue as most everyone, so, by any chance - has anyone seen a response to this analyses (split in two, here, so it can be posted)?
ReplyDeletejde:
"Yep!
You might want to rethink the idea of upgrading the forum software, perhaps postponing it until the SQL folks on the IT team discover how to construct a SELECT statement that will get all the albums that actually have "radio drama" set as a subgenre . . .
To understand this more clearly, enter "radio drama" in the "type your search here . . . " edit field at the top center of the CD Baby homepage, and then click on the "SEARCH" button to the right . . .
You will be presented with a search result which currently shows 59 "results" spread across 7 pages . . .
Go to the sixth page, where you will find several albums that have nothing to do with "radio drama", where for example one such album is "Mysterious China" (Homeless Balloon) . . .
There are some excellent songs on the "Mysterious China" album, and the sound quality and mixing is superb . . .
And I especially like the bowed viola, vocoder, guitar TONE--not sure of the precise instrument, but I like the TONE, and I think that I can get pretty close to it with a KORG Triton Music Workstation (88 Keys)--on "History of Silk" and "The Wall and the Moon" . . .
So, finding this album was great, and it certainly is fascinating and relaxing music, but I am not seeing how it relates to "radio drama" . . .
The problem from the perspective of Computer Science is that it requires a bit of skill and understanding of the overall data to construct searches that make sense, which some customers might have but probably not all customers, really . . .
While the words "radio" or "drama" appear somewhere in the information for the album "Mysterious China", the album is in a different genre and subgenre than "Spoken Word: Radio Drama", so the search is a highly filtered selection that basically ignores genre and subgenre, which is easily verified by doing a search on "spoken word, radio drama", where you will observe that this search produces no results, at all . . .
No results, at all . . .
To verify this, enter "spoken word, radio drama" in the "type your search here . . . " edit field and then click on the "SEARCH" button . . .
Yet, if you do a search on "spoken word", the result set appears to be over 100 pages, more or less . . .
What this tells me is that the database analysts who devised the SQL search statements did not take the time to understand the album and artist data and the way it is organized by genre, subgenre, style, mood, and so forth and so on, all of which I think that artists specify very precisely, since with what now is the "old" system, this was the way that worked best . . .
In other words, in the "old" system, the more specific information you provided, the easier it was for customers to have some probability of finding your stuff . . .
Having a degree in Computer Science and decades of experience with massive databases, some of which are handled by virtually mind-boggling arrays of data warehouse supercomputers, I have no problem revising my album descriptions, genres, subgenres, liner notes, blurbs, and so forth and so on toward the goal of appearing in every search that any customer might do, but is this really the best way to deal with the problem?
Not really!
Since genre and subgenre navigation is featured prominently in the top-left column of the new CD Baby website, I think the better solution simply is to make it work correctly . . .
In other words, consider this specific sequence and what happens:
ReplyDelete(1) At the CD Baby home page, click on "Genres", which takes you to the "Music Genres" selection page:
http://www.cdbaby.com/Style
(2) Then click on "Spoken Word", which takes you to this page:
http://www.cdbaby.com/Style/spoken
(3) Next, click on "Radio Drama" in the left-column, which takes you to this page:
http://www.cdbaby.com/Style/771
(4) What you will discover is that there is no way currently to view all the "Radio Drama" subgenre albums, so instead of being a logical hierachy, it is an arbitrarily and badly filtered blend of something, most of which is only vaguely related to what the customer expects to happen . . .
(5) And a huge clue of the problem with the behind the scenes design is found in the "Styles/771" naming convention . . .
One might expect that the "771" subgrouping of "Styles" maps to the tuple or doubleton {Spoken Word, Radio Drama}, but it does not, and this is a database design mistake, because whatever "771" might be, it is not the "Radio Drama" subgenre of the "Spoken Word" genre . . .
And now that I suppose I need to take the time to understand and to map everything, a few quick experiments tend to suggest that subgenres are somewhat mapped to numbers, although I think the mapping might be done via what in SQL are called "views" and are based on predetermined or "canned" SELECT statements . . .
For example, the "Bebop" subgenre of the "Jazz" genre is assigned the numerical style value "70", which is spanky, for sure . . .
And it appears that currently there are 878 different numerical style categories, which might map somewhat to subgenres, although perhaps not . . .
I certainly have no problems with using numerical values, since it certainly avoids the problems of concatenating subgenre text names (for example, "RadioDrama" or "SoloInstrumental"), which can get a bit messy when you have nearly one thousand of them . . .
The problem I have is that using "878" as the numerical value for the "Solo Instrumental" subgenre maps to a Mood rather than to a genre, which is interesting to discover . . .
OK!
So, it appears that "Moods" is a genre, and "Solo Instrumental" is a subgenre of "Moods" . . .
Works for me, except that if a customer is interested in "Solo Female Artists" or "Solo Male Artists", they need to know that both of these are subgenres of the "Moods" genre, which is patently goofy . . .
Who is going to know that?
I have no idea . . .
So, it appears that the "Moods" genre is a catch-all type of thing for all the stuff that made no sense to the folks who designed the database, which is spanky for sure, especially for those artists who are "Solo Female Artists" or "Solo Male Artists", because one might suggest that it makes it a bit difficult to find them . . .
And while some people find my virtually never-ending stream of consciousness stuff to be a bit verbose at times, so what . . .
So what!
If you want to understand how something works, so that you either can fix it or at least make it better, then you need to focus on minutiae, which takes time, even when you are highly skilled in it and have no problems when someone is ready, willing, and able to pay you to count all the grains of sand in a beach . . .
So, what do we know?
Great question!
We know that there are 878 "subgenre" numerical somethings, and fixing all of them so that they list everything is going to require examining, studying, understanding, and rewriting at least 878 SQL SELECT statements or stored procedures, which apparently were written by people who basically had only a minimal understanding of the way the information about CD Baby artists, albums, styles, genres, subgenres, and so forth and so on actually is organized . . .
So, while it can be done correctly, I think it will take a few weeks--once someone who either understands the data or can discover how to understand it can be found--which is fabulous . . .
ReplyDeleteFabulous!
In the interim, I am pondering the idea of doing a bit more research toward the goal of producing a "Spoken Word" genre album in the "Instructional", "Radio Drama", or "With Music" subgenre which explains how to write CD Baby album blurbs, liner notes, descriptions, and so forth toward the goal of getting your album to appear in every search that any customer might devise . . .
I see the poster! :-)
Thanks!"
turns out that jde's post had to be cut in three in order to post on this blog - so, that's it! has anyone responded to say this makes sense and can be fixed, or, is search functionality being addressed differently or what?!
Adrian, thanks for taking the time to post the jde qoute here. I don't know anything about it but hopefully someone else does, and can respond intelligently.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I noticed today that B/cide, one of the forum's most vociferous critics in the last few weeks, has dropped a mellower, more conciliatory post to the frontline staffers. He said, I'm paraphrasing, that he's beginning to see some improvements overall. I hope he's right!
jde has some interesting observations - I'd definitely like to hear more about...
ReplyDeleteas for B-CIDE I wonder what are those improvements?
I know from our perspective, the wonky accounting remains (and that is such a problem our book-keeper says there's no way the government will accept the numbers, unless they're fixed), there is still no calendar date (not just month) for DD reports and sales (now I've stopped checking daily, so, maybe some of these changes have been made, but they weren't when I last checked), there's still no "hits" feature, most CDs are buried dozens or a hundred or more pages in the new weird heirarchy, as of a few days back, people were reporting that emails are not returned for weeks, and phone callers are put on hold for an hour or so...
etc. etc.
if people are feeling sunnier, it's all relative
it still appears the programming is a disaster -and, pretty much everyone who sells with regularity has noticed a decline
it may just be that most people are good-natured, and don't want to stay mad for long; I know that everyone I'm in touch with find it's something of a lost cause - until we see if the promised fixes ever materialize
so, yes, hope springs eternal!
check out www.cdbabylawsuit.com
ReplyDelete