MusicMaster Blog

By Paul Ziino

I know we’ve talked about it before.  However, I regularly am asked “why are my artists playing so close to themselves, but not indicating any rule violation?”  In 90% of these cases, the issue is that the songs either have no Artist Keywords or have the wrong Artist Keywords.

Artist Keywords are what MusicMaster uses to keep the same artist apart from themselves.

Let’s use these examples:

BEATLES
THE BEATLES
BEATLES, THE

As far as MusicMaster is concerned, those are three unique keywords and thus they wouldn’t be separated.

There is an easy way to clean these up.  Go to Dataset/Library/Keywords, then select Artist Keywords in the dropdown.  This is a list of all the Artist Keywords in the database.  Any changes you make in this list immediately update throughout the database.

Below we see the keyword “Christina Aguilera.”  If I wish to change it to “Aguilera, Christina,” just type right over the top of it.

When I do, MusicMaster alerts me that there is another keyword listed that matches and asks if I’d like to combine them.  I will click Yes, and now any song that had the “Christina Aguilera” keyword on it will be updated to the “Aguilera, Christina” keyword.

A quick suggestion:  For groups, enter the keyword as the group’s name, “LED ZEPPELIN.”  For solo artists enter the keyword last, first, “PLANT, ROBERT.”  Now when you sort your library by artist keyword, it will appear as desired.  Also, I suggest not including the leading “THE”, so just “BEATLES” or “WHO” or “EAGLES” and so on.

Once you’ve cleaned up your keywords you’ll notice that artist separation rules work better.  When artist separation is working, your whole station will sound better because you’ll have the desired rest between plays of the same artist.