Curation Policy

1. What Counts As A Good Song Entry

A song entry is considered useful when it helps a visitor understand the sound of a period. The catalog can consider original release, documented chart activity, widespread performance, or a later revival, but those are different facts and must not be collapsed into a false exact release date.

The playlist is not meant to be a strict academic chart archive. It is a practical listening map for people who want to explore music by year. That means a track can be included because it represents a genre shift, a regional memory, a breakthrough artist, or a song that remains strongly associated with a particular era.

2. Manual Review Standards

Music Time Machine does not allow an automated search result to publish or overwrite a catalog fact. The maintenance process checks identity, date evidence, video availability, and fit within the surrounding listening window. Existing records are being normalized in documented batches, and the public curation journal identifies corrections that have completed this review.

• Use recognizable artist and song names.
• Prefer official music videos, official audio, label uploads, or artist channels.
• Avoid duplicate YouTube video IDs within the same generated playlist.
• Balance each region so one decade or genre does not dominate the whole experience.
• Keep old and new music together only when the listening-window relationship is clear.
• Use automated metadata and oEmbed checks as review leads, not as final release-date evidence.

3. Use Of YouTube Embeds

The site does not host music files, download links, or copied audio. Playback uses YouTube's official embed player. YouTube availability can change over time because of takedowns, region restrictions, channel changes, or disabled embedding. When a video stops working, the preferred fix is to replace the video ID with another official or stable source for the same song.

4. Corrections And Song Requests

Visitors can request corrections through the contact page. Helpful reports include the year, region, artist, title, and a short explanation of what is wrong. Examples include a broken video, wrong artist, duplicate song, inaccurate year, or a better official upload.

Song requests are reviewed before inclusion. A requested song may not be added if it lacks a stable video, does not fit the year, duplicates an existing entry, or would make a regional playlist too narrow. This keeps the site useful as a broad music discovery tool rather than a list of unrelated favorites.

5. Update Rhythm

The database is updated when broken videos are found, when new years need stronger coverage, or when a region needs better balance. New releases are treated carefully because a current hit may not remain representative after a few months. For recent years, entries may change more often than older decades.

The goal is steady improvement rather than mass publishing. Adding fewer well-reviewed songs is better than adding many low-context entries that make the site harder to navigate.

6. Release Dates And Listening Windows

The player currently displays the year bucket assigned to a selection. Visitors should read that value as the center of a listening window, which can include adjacent years, not as an exact discography field. When a correction is made from an artist, label, broadcaster, chart, library, or comparable authoritative record, the source and resulting change are added to the curation journal.

Reissue and compilation dates can look like original release dates in automated music services. For that reason, automated results are never used to rewrite the catalog without a source review.

7. User Experience Principles

Visitors should be able to understand the service without signing in, downloading software, or clicking through misleading screens. The main player, guide, about page, contact page, terms, and privacy policy are linked from the site navigation so both users and crawlers can understand the structure.

Ads are not shown on error pages, experimental pages, or screens whose only purpose is navigation or notification. Advertising, if enabled after policy review, should be secondary to the music guide and playlist experience.