Another problem with Democracy

Last.fm… They pick their artist pictures via a democratic process where you can vote them up or down. The other major issue with last.fm is that they have no solution for disambiguation of artists, so when you get down into the small indie bands there’s a great deal of overlap in names with different bands songs getting intermixed as well as the tags related to them. 

In this case, both problems are cropping up at the same time. A band that I really enjoy, but has a very low profile is Goner. They’ve released 3 CDs thus far and I enjoy all of them. They share a name with a band that seems to have only released a single song and has been tagged as “grindcore,” their only song is about 1 minute long and absolutely awful compared to the other band.

The problem is that the smaller band and their friends are aggressively promoting their pictures on the “goner” page and voting down the pictures from the other band. Because only a handful of the hundreds of listeners from the larger band even look at that page, they’re getting away with it. This goes back to the concept that democracy is rule by those able to speak loudest and convince the most people to pay attention on their side.

Because of this, whenever I play a song from the great Goner band, I get that urgly picture from the horrible Goner band on my profile…

If anyone feels like helping me out on last.fm though, http://www.last.fm/music/Goner is the band, andhttp://www.last.fm/music/Goner/+images/21975209 is the only picture from the real band.