Data Types
Factual Data
Factual or core metadata includes identifiers and names of the Artists, Albums, Recordings, and Tracks. The album endpoint also includes the release year, number of tracks, and ordinal.
Association Types
Associations indicate the relationships among Artists, Album Editions, and Recordings.
Alternate Names
Alternate names are names that the artist/group has recorded under. This includes differently styled names in billing, cover art, official merchandise, and so on.
Alternate names are not used where an artist creates an alternate persona. For example, Garth Brooks releasing material under the alternate persona of Chris Gaines creates a unique artist ID for alternate persona, instead of an alternate name for Garth Brooks.
Group Members
For Artists of type Group, A member is the relational association to the Artist IDs of individual members of a named group.
Collaboration Members
For Artists of type Collaboration, Collaboration Members is a relational association to the Artist IDs of a collaboration. For example, 2Pac Feat. Snoop Doggy Dogg, Nate Dogg & Dru Down. Each is a collaborationMember of the Collaboration.
Disambiguation
The Artist Disambiguation field includes information that can be useful to differentiate artists with identical names, using editorial Genre and Origin data to easily display disambiguation. This field is only available in English currently.
Key Artists
A core artist may have released material under more than one ensemble name, yet all of these are considered part of the core artist’s body of work. In these cases, for Artists of type Group, Has Key Artist is the association to the Artist ID of the Individual Artist who is the leader of the ensemble. This facilitates unified presentation of the complete body of work. For example, Prince is a key artist in Prince & The Revolution, and Miles Davis is a key artist in the Miles Davis Quintet.
Member of Groups
For Artists of type Group, memberOfGroups is the relational association to Artist ID of a named group.
Member of Collaborations
Lists all the collaborations for an Artist.
Name Variants
Name Variants can include full name, birth names, misspellings, nicknames, etc.
Artist Type
Artist Type describes whether an artist is an individual, group or collaboration. A collaboration may combine two or more individuals and or groups.
Similar Artists
Similar artists is an editorially assigned field that associates artists that are significantly stylistically like one another. Most of the similar artists may have a similar primary genre.
Stylistic similarity may be of one or more of the following:
- Similarity of musical style: The overall musical character / “gestalt” that is formed from the combination of various musical elements in the artist’s recordings:
- Similar genre or combination of genres (high-level)
- Similar mood or combination of moods (high-level)
- Similar musical characteristics, including chord progressions, melodic style, instrumentation (both tonal and percussive), timbres, rhythm type, vocal style and intonation, playing style, harmony/modes/scales, arrangements and overall production style.
- Similarity of lyrical style: Lyrical style includes similar topics, worldview, attributes, personality, mood, vocabulary, slang, dialect, language.
- Similarity of visual aesthetic: Similarity in cover art, logos, posters & other visual content; video, film, TV, concert style and production design; fashion (e.g., clothing, hairstyle, make-up); physical characteristics
Sort Name
You can use sortName to efficiently organize and manage lists of Artists:
- Artists: ‘Family name, First name’, for example “Swift, Taylor”.
- Artists of type Group: “Group name, Article”, for example “Beatles, The”.
Person ID
PersonID indicates the type of person (such as a celebrity). This supports linking artists from GMD to other Gracenote datasets, which include:
- Podcasts: Audio on Demand (AOD)
- Video: On API
Popularity
Score on a scale of 0 to 1 which is derived from streaming consumption data from a given breakout, for a given period, for Artists and Recordings. Popularity Scores are available for Artists and Recordings only and can be licensed via zones aligned with the United Nations geoscheme. Corresponding breakout sets are associated with each of the zones.