The architecture of information:
A tweet from MacStories founder Federico Viticci highlights a change in Apple Music’s information architecture:
Looks like Apple has brought back one of the best features from Beats Music with Apple Music: Other Versions of the same album.
— Federico Viticci (@viticci) February 18, 2020
This section collects remasters, reissues, remixes, demos, deluxe editions, and explicit/clean versions of the same album. đź’Ż pic.twitter.com/0FrHmxkqsP
Special editions of albums have been around for a while. It’s not unusual for classic albums to be remixed, or remastered, or get re-released with additional tracks. If you search Apple Music for The Rolling Stones’ Let it Bleed, for example, you will find both Let it Bleed and Let it Bleed (50th Anniversary Edition). This change to Apple Music’s architecture links both editions so the user knows that there’s a relationship.
Digital music is a great source of interesting IA examples. Most music in a modern catalog follows a hierarchy that looks something like this: Artist → Album → Song. These objects can also be tagged with several metadata facets, such as genre, year, etc.
What makes it so interesting is that there are lots of exceptions. In classical music, for example, there’s often a distinction between the performer of the piece and its composer. Which one should be considered the “artist”? (If you’re intrigued by this question, listen to my conversation with Thomas Dose on The Informed Life podcast.)
There are also bands with similar names, albums with the same name but recorded by different bands, and the issue highlighted above: the same album but different somehow. Of all these cases, this last one is perhaps the easiest to solve. Still, it’s good to see Apple making the architecture of its music catalog clearer.