What the data gets wrong
Every example names a board that has already run, so you can open it and check.
Every Musicianle board is built from open data that other people maintain. The about page says where it comes from. This page says where it goes wrong, because a puzzle built on a mistake cannot be solved fairly, and you should know which boards had one.
All the boards below are in the archive with their answers. If what we say here does not match the archive page, the archive page is right.
One album, stored more than once
MusicBrainz, where the release lists come from, does not store an album as a single thing. It stores release groups, and one record can end up as two of them, say once filed as an album and once as an EP. Our own builder made it worse. Some musicians exist in MusicBrainz as two or three separate entries, which we merge into one person, and every copy of a record comes along with the merge.
So the same album appeared on a board twice. Jeff Buckley's board on 22 August listed Last Goodbye twice, identical on every line. Bruce Springsteen's on 3 September showed Born in the U.S.A. twice, once as an album and once as an EP.
On 9 September we counted them: 100 duplicate rows across 47 of the 386 scheduled boards. We now merge two rows when the title and the year both match, or when one title is the other with EP on the end and the years are one apart. We do not merge on the title alone. Roberto Carlos released 38 different albums called Roberto Carlos, roughly one a year, and a title-only rule would have folded his career into a single line.
The Jeff Buckley board is the one where the cost shows up in the numbers. It was rated easy. It was started 12 times and solved twice, a lower rate than any board rated hard. He released one studio album in his lifetime, and a board showing eleven releases with one of them repeated does not look like him. It shows nine now.
A genre that describes the film
Genres come from Wikidata. When a release is a film soundtrack, the genre Wikidata holds for it is often the genre of the film. So the column that is meant to tell you what the music sounds like said family film for a Despicable Me soundtrack on Pharrell Williams's board on 29 July, and LGBTQ-related film for the Freeheld soundtrack on Johnny Marr's on 15 September.
We now drop film and television genres before any board is built. That removed 24 rows across 10 boards, and every one of them fell back to a real music genre, so no board lost its genre column. Those two rows now read pop music and soundtrack. A few genres contain the word film and are still music, and those stay: film score is what a score is called, and Indian film music is the right genre for a large part of the Indian catalogue.
One thing on those two boards looks like an error and is not. The 2014 soundtrack for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 appears on both, because MusicBrainz lists both men as artists on it.
A genre column with nothing in it
Wikidata has a genre for 41 percent of the release groups we have asked it about. When a release has none, we show the musician's own genre instead. When the musician has none either, the column is blank.
Three boards were blank for a reason that had nothing to do with Wikidata. We refreshed our copy of the genres four days after building the boards and never rebuilt them, so the genres sat in our own files unused. Cardi B's board on 6 September was played with an empty genre column because of that. It has one now.
Eight boards are still blank, and we cannot fix those from here. We checked each of those musicians against Wikidata directly, and none of them has a genre, on themselves or on any release. One of the eight has already run: Dick Van Dyke on 2 September.
Fame measured on the wrong career
That board has a second problem. Difficulty comes from Wikipedia readership, on the idea that a musician many people read about is one many people will know. For an actor who has made a few records, it measures the wrong career. Dick Van Dyke is read by a great many people, very few of them for the music, so the board was rated easy with four releases and no genres at all.
He reached the pool because a widely read name needs fewer releases to qualify than an obscure one, and four was enough. We have not fixed this. Changing who is allowed to be an answer would move the schedule, and the schedule is fixed a year ahead.
What we leave wrong on purpose
Two versions of the same soundtrack under slightly different titles still sit side by side. The 29 July board shows Despicable Me next to Despicable Me: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, and the 2 September board shows the Mary Poppins soundtrack twice, once in its French edition. Merging those needs a rule that treats a subtitle as a duplicate, and that rule would also merge In My Mind with In My Mind: The Prequel, which are two different records on the same 29 July board. A wrong merge hides a real release. We would rather show one twice.
An archive page can also list a release the board itself left out. How to read a discography explains why.
How to check any of this
Every board stays in the archive with its answer from the day after it runs. If a line on a board looks wrong to you, the archive page for that date is the thing to argue with, and you will usually be right. Every error on this page was found by reading those pages.
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