What is in a name? (The Last Word)
"What is in a name?" is the seventh instalment of the blog The Last Word, authored by Will Rothers (better known as Big Brother, the former webmaster of The Residents' official website). It was published around June 2008 in the Historical sub-section of the website.
The blog
What's in a name?
Again I noted a discussion above that I would like to respond to:
When you put a CD into your computer and the names are looked up and downloaded, where do the names come from?
The answer is that they come from Sony owned, Gracenote. Gracenote maintains a huge database of CD track listings. They get the names for song titles from YOU. You rip a CD and type in the song titles and they grab them. You make up your own titles instead of the correct ones and if you are first to do it, then the CD now has the titles you gave it (if you click the button in iTunes that sends them to Gracenote.)
So that is how Residents CD’s like The 12 Days of Brumalia and the second disc of Animal Lover ended up with wacky names when you load them into your computer.
I contacted Gracenote to see how to correct the titles. Their position is that the titles are only for convenience. They make no claims that the titles listed are correct. They are not historians. So they don’t change them. How do they know if what I claim to be the titles is any more correct than the list they have in the computer? GRRRR
Anyway, it is just another fluke of modern day life. The Gracenote titles will not be found here in the Historical or in the BMI database. They will be found 99.9% of everywhere else.