Most Popular Composers page?
Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2010 6:32 pm
I was wondering, to make it easier for the general public to access widely wanted scores by popular composers, is it possible to create a page with like, the 10 or 100 most popular composers? (which, I imagine, would include Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Chopin etc etc)
The upside of this would be that people who are looking for a piece by one of those really famous composers could really really easily access the scores, without having to go to the composer-name list, click on the last name letter, then scroll through all the names until they find the person they are looking for (let alone those people who don't know that so many members of the Bach family were composers having to figure out which one is the one they are looking for).
The downside would be that, by stripping these composers from the list of all the composers and putting them on a pedestal, we kind of undermine the rest of the composers listed on the website as "unimportant", and people who perhaps would click on a few random names and discover some new music while looking for a particular composer might end up not doing so. It would also be a form of favouritism, but not an unreasonable one. An argument in defense of having a "most popular composers" page would be that, people who are interested in discovering little-known or new music would nevertheless browse through the catalogue, whereas people who are here looking for a particularly popular score by a popular composer are not going to spend much (or any) time browsing through irrelevant scores.
The popularity could be realised in terms of "most visited pages" as they appear on IMSLP. Is there a way to list the top 10 most visited composer pages? I think the population sample consisting of IMSLP visitors is large/accurate/relevant enough to draw results as to who the most popular composers would be.
The upside of this would be that people who are looking for a piece by one of those really famous composers could really really easily access the scores, without having to go to the composer-name list, click on the last name letter, then scroll through all the names until they find the person they are looking for (let alone those people who don't know that so many members of the Bach family were composers having to figure out which one is the one they are looking for).
The downside would be that, by stripping these composers from the list of all the composers and putting them on a pedestal, we kind of undermine the rest of the composers listed on the website as "unimportant", and people who perhaps would click on a few random names and discover some new music while looking for a particular composer might end up not doing so. It would also be a form of favouritism, but not an unreasonable one. An argument in defense of having a "most popular composers" page would be that, people who are interested in discovering little-known or new music would nevertheless browse through the catalogue, whereas people who are here looking for a particularly popular score by a popular composer are not going to spend much (or any) time browsing through irrelevant scores.
The popularity could be realised in terms of "most visited pages" as they appear on IMSLP. Is there a way to list the top 10 most visited composer pages? I think the population sample consisting of IMSLP visitors is large/accurate/relevant enough to draw results as to who the most popular composers would be.