I’d like to discuss releases in the ACG category (specifically the IMAS series released by Columbia). If the tracklist only lists the character name performing the song, but then adds the corresponding character voice in the “Starring by” section below, is it prohibited for me to add this information to the tracklist?
In my understanding, this is an optional edit that supplements useful information. While it may not be a mandatory practice, perhaps it should at least not be prohibited?
I have a feeling you are working in a genre which I don’t know well, because I’m trying to figure out what you mean by “ACG”, “IMAS”, and “character name performing the song”.
Does ACG mean “Animation, Comics, and Games” (per Wikipedia)? When you say, “character name performing the song”, do you mean that the Release is a sound track or a cover of a sound track for a movie or cartoon, where the characters in the story make music, and that music is in the Release?
If I am understanding correctly, then a first observation is that this edit inserts performer names into Track titles, when presumably the Release packaging did not include those names in the printed or digital track titles. MusicBrainz has an alternative place to put performer information: as Relationships between the Recording linked to the Track, and the Artist who does the performing. See Artist Relationship Guide for Artists, and the Artist-Recording relationship types list.
Also, there might be parallels with opera and musical theatre cast recordings and movie sound tracks. That means the Theatre style guidelines or the Classical Style Guide’s Track Title style might provide models to follow. However, none of those guidelines are very clear about how to label character names in track titles and track artists.
We’re specifically talking about Japanese character songs, where the industry standard is that both the character and the singer are part of the artist credit, side-by-side, joined by the “CV” phrase. This isn’t new in MusicBrainz and has been edited this way since day one of the current database schema.
It’s relatively rare for the artist credit to omit the singer. This specific discussion is about a specific franchise that by convention applies this relatively rare case to its CDs, where the track-level credit for the CD only mentions the character. However, these same CDs include the singer alongside the character at the release-level credit following the JP CV standard convention. Furthermore, the digital versions of this franchise’s releases follow the JP CV standard. So the discussion is about whether the incomplete track-level credit should be expanded to match the more-complete release-level artist credit, which is the same as the more-complete track-level credits used in the digital version of the same release, which matches the JP industry standard used in 99.999% of cases.
I see. This is obviously one of the many areas of music metadata that I don’t know much about, so I will leave you well-informed people to figure it out.
It sounds like there is an informal track title style developing among the well-informed editors. Is it worth writing down and making an official style guideline? It might save the next new ACG editor some trouble.
Thank you very much for your reply. First, I need to clarify what I’m doing. For releases like Animation, Comics, and Games category, a track typically lists both the fictional artist and the corresponding voice actor. The current issue is that I’m attempting to link these two entities in the artist credits within the tracklist (since this information is present in the booklets) even though the tracklist section only lists the fictional artists performing the tracks. Immediately following this, the same page prints which voice actor provided the voices for each fictional artist.
There is currently no universally accepted guideline for how to credit artists within the Animation, Comics, and Games category, which is precisely why I wanted to clarify this issue. Based on my understanding, I believe that information explicitly detailing the relationship between characters and singers—as printed in the booklet—should be considered part of the release itself. It should not merely be noted in the recording but reflected in the artist credits within the tracklist. From another perspective, it should at least not be considered improper editing (or destructive editing, since it supplements potentially useful information printed in the booklet). Focusing solely on how the tracklist area is labeled seems incomplete to me.
If no such information is printed in the booklet at all, adding it would constitute destructive editing, as this material does not originate from the release itself.
@TheM14 I appreciate your diligence and care. That is the spirit that helps the database to keep on improving.
One note about this comment:
If there’s one thing I have learned from the Classical Style Guide, and opera metadata, teaches, it is that the tracklist as printed on the CD or the back of the package or whereever is often incomplete or mistaken, and needs to be supplemented. But also I have learned that Relationships are a often a better place to store that data than the text string of a MusicBrainz Release entry’s Track Title.
To pick one example opera release arbitrarily, take a look at this Carmen album (release/f59b) . MusicBrainz presents this Release and its Tracks, together with a lot of information retrieved from Relationships. For instance, it shows you that the singer on track 6 is Victoria de los Ángeles — but this information comes from a Relationship, not from the Track Title. And that Relationship is between Recording and Artist, but MusicBrainz nevertheless presents it as part of the Release display.
So, for singers in ACG releases, if you record the information as Release-Artist “vocal performance” Relationships, it will still appear in the MusicBrainz display for that Release. Data does not need to be inserted into the Track Title string in order to be in the Release display.
Thank you very much for providing the example of Carmen. It was very enlightening and helped me understand the logic behind how “performers” are handled in classical style guides.
However, I’d like to add a point from the perspective of the unique nature of the ACG category, which may also be an area where we need to treat things differently.
In classical music, Artist Credits typically refer to real-world artists (such as composers or conductors). But in ACG, Artist Credits often denote “fictional characters”. If we simply list the character name in the Artist Credit, logically this equates to attributing the vocal performance to an entity that doesn’t physically exist at the release level, creating a certain incompleteness.
I believe that since the official booklet explicitly prints the correspondence between characters and voice actors (Starring/CV), this indicates the official intent to present the “fictional character” and the “real voice actor” as a unified entity. This combination should be regarded as a complete artist entity and directly reflected in the Artist Credit.