Give a machine a pile of tracks and it will happily tell you what genre each one is. It will be fast, confident and wrong in ways that make a junglist want to throw a speaker out the window. Building a DnB and jungle genre taxonomy for DROP THE BASS taught us something we should have known already: naming things is not data cleanup. It is editorial work. Provider tags are hints. Every label needs a paper trail. The machine may propose. A person accepts. And when there is no evidence, the model does not get called at all.
Provider tags are hints, not truth
Streaming and event platforms come with genre tags. Some are good. Some are a marketing department's idea of DnB. Until recently an import could quietly overwrite a genre someone had chosen by hand, which is the data version of a stranger rearranging your record shelf while you sleep.
Now imports never wipe or overwrite genres, and a provider string never becomes a genre on its own. It gets read, interpreted and kept as a hint next to the real decision.
- Imports from Spotify or RA cannot overwrite a chosen genre.
- No new genre is created just because a provider typed a word.
- Provider terms are interpreted, not obeyed.
A tag from a platform is a rumor with metadata. Treat it like a rumor.
Provider tag versus our decision
| What a provider might say | Canonical genre | Decision |
|---|---|---|
| Liquid or liquid DnB | Liquid Funk | Restored as the canonical name |
| Ragga or reggae jungle | Ragga Jungle | Named properly and published |
| Footwork | Footwork | Kept hidden for now |
| Anything unknown | None | Stays a hint until a person decides |
Every label carries a paper trail
Each genre on an artist, release or label now records where it came from. A human editor. A provider hint. A proposal from the engine that someone accepted. If a label is wrong you can see exactly how it got there, and fix the cause instead of the symptom.
The full taxonomy is visible on the genres page, so the decisions are public and arguable. That is the point. Names in a scene should be argued about by people who care, not settled by whichever API answered first.
How a label is allowed to happen
- Propose: the classifier or the label engine suggests a genre.
- Evidence: the suggestion must point to eligible first-party text written or approved by a person.
- Review: an editor sees the proposal with its evidence.
- Accept: only a person turns a proposal into a label.
- No evidence means no proposal and no model call at all.
No evidence, no model call
The classifier is review-only and its switch is off by default. Only human-written or approved first-party text may reach a model. Spotify text is blocked in code. If nothing eligible exists the system makes zero model calls instead of guessing.
Start from the labels
Editors describe record labels. The engine then proposes genres for the artists and releases connected to them. Evidence is counted once per source so one loud page cannot vote ten times, and derived proposals never feed further guesses. Every proposal can be reviewed and rejected.
It is a small rule with a big effect: the machine can widen what an editor knows, but it cannot invent a chain of its own assumptions.
Before a machine may label anything
- The evidence is first-party text a person wrote or approved.
- The source is recorded on the label.
- Provider tags are stored as hints and never as decisions.
- A derived guess cannot become evidence for the next guess.
- A person accepts or rejects every proposal.
- There is a kill switch and it starts off.
The same rule outside music
Naming is one case of a wider habit: do not serve what is not true. VPNScoreLab stopped showing synthetic lab speeds. Its unpublished articles now actually return 404 instead of living on in cache. CoinFaro does the same for missing incidents with a real 404 and noindex rather than a cached page that says everything is fine.
A missing page that admits it is missing is more useful than a confident ghost.
A name like liquid funk is not a database value. It is a name a scene made, and we just have to write it down correctly.
Tell us
If we got a name wrong, we would rather hear it now than after the next import.
Originally published on the Spicanet blog: https://spicanet.dev/blog/naming-things-is-editorial-work
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