FAQ?

FAQ?

What is this? 12
You should check out the About Page. There's way more info there.
How is a song chosen? 89

Simple answer, if the lyrics reference a city, state, or country, the song gets added to the list.

Long answer, some songs are direct and mention "Brooklyn NY", those are easy. Others mention "The City of Lights", well that is the common nickname for Paris, France, that's also easy. Others are slightly harder to deduce - "See that Italian Tower Leaning", well that is refferencing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, in, Pisa, Italy.

The place needs to be present in the lyrics of the song. Being in the title doesn't matter.

Ok, detailed Criteria? 147
  1. The song must be primarilally in English. I speak and understand English, it only makes sense to focus on English language songs. In the future I think it would be super cool to add other lanugages into the mix, but that's not for now.
  2. The location must be obvious in the lyrics of the song. Ideally, this means a direct call out to the city, state, or country. A landmark within the city (Eifel Tower), or a common name for a city (Big Apple).
  3. You should be able to know right away where a place is just by listening to the song. No need to know the backstory about how and when it was written.
  4. Every rule has an exception or two, and the context of the song and artist matters; Paris France is more likely than Paris Texas, Billy Joel singing about 5th Avenue likely means New York City.
Can I make a Spotify Playlist? 56
I wish! I built all the functionality to do that, but Spotify changed their account policies - I need 50,000 monthly active users to get into the public version of their API. So you can show this site to your friends and family and keep coming back and maybe next month the data will be there!
Why isn't XYZ Song here? 41

Short answer, I don't know it?

Long answer, mainly see How above. But I also don't know every song, and I'm not going to add every song that I don't know. I have a backlog of songs to insert, it's slow going...

What about Cover Songs? 50
There aren't too many cover songs in the list. I'm sure I've missed some though, and the list will never be complete. I do keep track of cover songs and reference the original artist. I don't (currently) have a good way to filter on those, but the data is there.
How about Live Versions? 22

No.

Live versions typically contain shoutouts to whatever city the album was recorded at and don't represent the actual lyrics of the song.

What about "I've Been Everywhere?" 27
I don't know why, there's many different versions of that song all refferencing specific places that each artist chooses. It doesn't fit the spirit of the site.
Why not the writers of the songs? 52
The average person does not know who wrote a song, yes it's true many artists write their own songs, but just as many do not. Additionally, many songs have multiple writers and it gets hard to organize that in a visual way. I do want to add it in in the future.
What about Duets or Featured? 28
Those are hard. Right now I'm classifying them by the first artist, or the primary one. However I know that that's not ideal. I'll figure something out eventually...
What year do you use? 49
Release year of the album. Not the single (if it was a single), not the year it was recorded, not the year it was first performed live. The year it was first available in an album, or for very early straight up released. This is the cleanest and fairest.
Something is wrong on the internet! 114

I'm not perfect (though better than AI). I started this list from my own personal music collection and added to it by heavy research and reading lyrics. I know I missed some. I know I missed catogorized some.

The first 600 or so songs I added by hand and should be accurate, everything after that I enlisted the help of computers. Not specifically an AI, but computers and scripts. How else was I going to get to over 9,000!

That being said, scripts aren't perfect, parsing isn't perfect, there's 23 (twentythree) Springfield's! Things will be off, things will be wrong. Don't hesitate to send me a message about it. I'll probably get to fixing it eventually.

Can I add entries? 38
Eventually yes. I'm just one person and opening this to the public is a surefire way to get impressive ascii art entries. So, I need to think long and hard about how to allow signups. Got any ideas?