Why doesn't Itunes Store music come with complete data?

Factual Questions
1

Why is it that when I buy songs from the Itunes Store I have to spend hours and hours hunting down the names of composers and the original recording dates? Shouldn’t this kind of info be easier for them to compile than it is for me?

2

That’s strange; what music are you buying from them?

Most of my music that they stock gives me the full info, even if I didn’t buy it from them. (Although they won’t give me info or album art for separately-downloaded music videos. Grr. :mad:)

Looking back through my music, I do notice that some of them which iTunes does stock are mysteriously not giving me the full info. None of these are from iTunes however. Does anyone know why this is?

Valete,
Vox Imperatoris

3

This is weird; even when I import songs that I’ve already imported into iTunes, it refuses to get the information for that same songs again!

Valete,
Vox Imperatoris

4

Does anyone know anything about this?

Valete,
Vox Imperatoris

5

I know I’m breaking the record for multiple posts here, but this is really weird: it just gave me song information out of the blue for a song (“All Around”—Lia) that they don’t even stock. How is this happening?

Valete,
Vox Imperatoris

6

The track and album information you receive from itunes is not from their database it’s from the Gracenote database. They’re a separate company who provide the information to other companies as well. As far as I know the information Gracenote uses comes mostly from the users so it’s not always accurate.

7

Everything I’ve bought has the year filled in. Are you just talking about reissues not having the right date?

I’m not sure why they don’t provide composers. Maybe they figured it wasn’t worth the effort, since the data would be provided by the record labels (if they wanted to even bother) but Apple would get blamed for any inaccuracies.

8

Yes. They always put the date of reissue, which is basically useless, because hardly anything then has a date prior to about 1999.

Then where are they getting the title and artist information? Furthermore, I should think that the copyright owners would insist that music be distributed with the names of the composers noted. A CD always lists the composers. Why not downloaded music?

9

There are two different things here:

  1. Importing (“ripping”) a CD into Itunes – the track info is provided by Gracenote, and, as HongKongFooey says, is often wrong.

  2. Buying music from the Itunes Store – all you get is title/artist/album/year. And the year is often a very recent reissue date, not the original date of the recording.