How should we tag questions about song lyrics?

Question

Currently, we have a number of song-lyrics questions. Currently, all of them are tagged with [song-lyrics] and the name of the artist who wrote the song.

Should we also include a tag for the specific album (the same way that we tag specific books by authors)? I'm inclined to say that we should, because it makes it easier to identify questions you're likely to know the answer to; you aren't necessarily equally familiar with all of the albums by a particular band.

I don't think that we should start tagging specific songs yet (to avoid a proliferation of tags), unless we end up having a lot of questions about certain songs. (The concern, of course, is that if we do end up with a lot of questions about specific songs, it could require more of a cleanup/re-tag effort to retroactively apply the new tag if we created the new tag after the fact.

Opinions? How should we handle these tags?

Answer 1

Existing policy is not to create tags for individual short works. The issue of whether or not we need tags for any individual works has been debated several times. The result of the latest meta discussion was in favour of using such tags, but the voting was fairly divided and we didn't get a very strong majority; however, what we've actually been doing in practice on the site for a long time has been to create tags for individual long works such as novels, plays, series, etc.

Thus, what you suggest is pretty much right. We shouldn't be creating tags for individual songs. I confess that I know practically zero about popular songs or any kind of non-classical music, so I'm unsure of exactly what an album is and hence whether it's worth a tag, but:

• if the songs within an album are always associated with and part of that album (like chapters in a book, say), then tag the album, just like we have tags for wheel-of-time and hamlet;
• if an album is merely a collection of songs which could equally well be found in a different collection or individually, i.e. an individual song isn't necessarily associated with one album or another, then it's analogous to an anthology and existing consensus says don't tag the album.

Answer 2

Current practice is as follows:

• Questions about lyrics for songs on a musical album: we tag with the band or the author of the lyrics and the tag song-lyrics but not with the title of the album. For example, the two questions about the Steely Dan song "Do It Again" are tagged steely-dan and song-lyrics, and nothing else. Similarly, the question about Jean Ferrat's song "Ma France" is tagged with jean-ferrat (he wrote the lyrics), song-lyrics and french-literature.
• Questions about songs that appear in other literary works, such as novels, plays and epics, which are long enough to get a title tag, are tagged with the the title of the longer work in which they appear (since the question is also about that longer work), the author's name. Tagging with song-lyrics appears to be inconsistent (although there are too few examples of this on the site to talk of "consistency"):
  • Bilbo’s song of Eärendil in “The Fellowship of the Ring” is tagged poetry.
  • What does “Hoo's fully resolved t' sew up meawth an' eend” mean in “Mary Barton”? has neither poetry nor song-lyrics.