I love music.
In particular, I love Israeli music.
In the last few years, I usually have some files of Israeli music with me when I leave my home, or my country – on my laptop or on my phone (ripped from CDs that I own, which is legit as far as my interpretation of copyright law goes).
And sometimes people from other countries are curious about it and ask me to copy some files for them. This is a copyright issue, but I justify it by the fact that they hardly have a chance to purchase it where they live, so they aren’t really hurting the relevant market. But there’s something bigger: a technical issue with the artist and song names.
Hebrew is written in the Hebrew alphabet. CDs have artist names and song titles in Hebrew, with English translations or transliterations added only occasionally. When I rip CDs, I give the files names in Hebrew letters. Most people around the world don’t know the Hebrew alphabet, so looking for a song they like using these files will be impossible for them. They would only be able to enjoy them if they don’t mind listening to everything in a shuffle. And though the newest phones are able to display Hebrew correctly, some devices that people have are still unable to do that.
I actually recall myself renaming files en masse to let friends from other countries listen to some Israeli music and now the artists’ names.
I’m not sure how to resolve this robustly, but much like with email and social networks and with legal forms, songs could use titles in different languages or scripts. Maybe MusicBrainz or Wikidata could add a structured property for transliterated song titles, and music files could be identified like that. Maybe each music track could have multiple fields for titles in different languages.
It’s good not just for international exchange between friends, but for marketing, too – some cultures only listen to music in English and maybe in their own language, but some are OK with listening to music in a lot of languages, because they are all equally foreign.
Long story short, song names must be more easily localizable than they are today.
Aharoni in Unicode 