My guest in the latest episode of The Informed Life podcast is Thomas Dose. Thomas is the Head of Music Services for DR, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. In this role, he works with a large collection of music:
The department I’m working in has been systematically collecting music since 1949, and the physical archives that they consist of roughly about 900,000 physical units, that is records, which are shellacs, vinyl, CDs, and so on. But obviously for the last decade or so, we haven’t really added much to the physical archive. Only on those instances where a release is purely on physical, we will acquire that such. What else it’s all digital now. But we’re still very happy with the physical archive. It’s not collecting dust because the editorial units in DR are basically ordering digitization of older materials every day, and we handle those. And we digitize those from from vinyl and from shellac. And you would be surprised of the volume of music that is still not available on the mainstream streaming services. You think that it’s interesting that every piece of music recorded ever is on Spotify. It’s not nearly the case. So we’re still recording from from our physical archives.
Such massive amounts of music require mindful organization, and in this conversation we delved into how such a thing can be structured to make particular pieces of music easier to find.
In our case, our data model basically supports two types of composition. And one is, you could say, the normal type of composition where you have a title for the composition and then you would have composers and lyricists related to that. And the other type of composition would support sub-compositions, which is basically in one of the obvious example is you have a symphony which would have four movements and then and so those are the sub-compositions. And we are then able to relate each of these sub-compositions or movements to all the different recordings of this movement and this work.
We also discussed a problem I’ve had with my own music collection: how to organize pieces that originated before the era of recording technologies, and which don’t fit neatly into album-length containers. The show is worth your time — especially if you manage a lot of music.
The Informed Life Episode 18: Thomas Dose on Music Collections