The Great Music Section Sort Out !

Are there any plans afoot to sort out some of the huge amount of duplicates there are out there in the music section? I don't mind that films are the principal focus of this site, but I feel the music section is vastly overlooked. Here are a few examples from the top of my head of some of the problems there:

A search for Joanna Newsom:
www.listal.com/artists/search/Joanna%20Newsom

As far as I know, she's only released 2 albums, but she is credited as having 94 items in the database. Even accounting for unheard of EPs, collaborations or whatever that I don't know about, that's an incredible overstatement of the amount of work she's put out.

Clicking on the '94 items' brings up just ten. Some of these are duplicates, but there's obviously a bug there somewhere. The duplicates are a real pain for anyone who uses the 'Rate Music Items' function.

Also, there are two other results that are mimics of each other, only one has '&' instead of 'and' in the title.

Another obvious problem I have found:

www.listal.com/artist/beyonce
www.listal.com/artist/beyonce-knowles

Replicated artists that don't have standard naming conventions. There appear to be a 'Beyoncé' and 'Beyonce' in the database too, which is confusing.

What can we do to clean some of this stuff up?

The duplicates may not actually be duplicates. They are probably different versions of the same release. An album for example can be issued across labels depending on licensing rights for various national markets, there may be different editions, for example a promo, a gatefold sleeve, a limited edition with a booklet, then there's different media, vinyl, CD.

So what in fact appear to be duplicates are all just diferent versions or editions of the same thing.

Whenever I add anything to my music collection I always cross reference the version/edition I own with the discogs database & Amazon to ensure I'm adding the right stuff.

That can lead to a very messy list when you are searching for your "regular" version of a CD though escafeld. There is a similar thing in games now where they have grouped together the 101 different versions of a game into just the title of the game. I think there was meant to be the option to write what version you physically had though for your personal collections, but to be honest I haven't checked or done this for mine as yet.

Rated section).

An alternative is to make the music section like the movies section. The movies section just has one version and leaves the collection variables in the DVD part of the site. I guess this would be much more difficult to implement for Tom though.

I still don't see the harm in erasing duplicates in the database that nobody owns/rates. And the '94 Items' bit must be a bug that needs fixing.