We have been working away, drilling into our entire background matching process, and are delighted to say that we have made significant improvements overall, making it much faster and more accurate.
Stick Blog
This blog is new! We now have a space to share announcements, new features and updates.
Multi Artist Plays
We now support and capture information on multi-artist plays. Previously, a multi artist play was listed as one string with its own artist page, for example Oliver Tree and Robin Schulz’s "Miss You" would have had the artist incorrectly as either Oliver Tree alone, or “Oliver Tree & Robin Schulz” in one string. Now, both of these artists get resolved and split.
On top of this, songs that an artist features on no longer appear in the “Albums” or “Singles” section of their artist profile, 1.2.0 introduces a brand new “Appears On” section.
Apple Music Live Listens
Apple Music Live Listens are now slightly faded out until they are confirmed by a Data Import. Due to the inherent limitations of the Apple Music connection we felt it was important to show the difference between a live listen and one that has been vouched for and confirmed.
Before confirming:
After confirming:
Last.fm Data Imports
Importing from last.fm now does a much better job of distinguishing between artist, album and song name.
Apple Music Data Imports
We have discovered that we can make Apple Music data imports much more accurate. Up until 1.2.0 we were running on the assumption that Apple Music data files did not contain the artist, and we put a lot of work into trying to resolve the correct artist with the little information we were given. We tuned this as best we could, but it was never going to be perfect.
After some exploration and poking around we found that Apple does include the artists in a separate file! Due to this finding we have enhanced our importer to look at both these files. On average we now get more than 90% of the artists, whereas before we got 0.
Important note - this change now means that when you upload an Apple Music file, we now require 4 files from the Apple Data Export. The importer will automatically guide the user through this.
Background Worker
The biggest updates that 1.2.0 brings are to our bespoke background matching algorithm. We have brought in new methods to match plays to their MusicBrainz database entry much faster. We have also better prioritised the work, meaning one user’s data upload will not completely starve another user’s live listens for example. The whole system is much faster, much fairer and more robust.