Adding a song that has very little info on it

MusicBrainz Style
#1

Hello folks, I’d like some advice.

I was wondering, how, if at all, would I tag a recording that’s never been released anywhere and barely has an artist associated to it?

So this is the song I’m referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzWjpSHuzm0

To make it short, this recording has been floating around Russian cyberspace for years now, there’s some vague references to the original artist going by “Afghanistan” (АВГАНИСТАН) but even that is dubious at best and there’s 0 info on who that person is, when this was recorded, etc. I was thinking I could upload it as a standalone recording under the [unknown] artist, but that seems really thin.

So I was wondering, would this recording even qualify to be on Musicbrainz at all? Would this be a appropriate time to make a standalone recording without any release associated? Should I put АВГАНИСТАН as the artist even though it’s extremely unclear whether or not that actually is an artist that exists, or whether or not they produced this song?

For the record, the artist is credited as “Afghanistan” on both a lyrics site and a site which has the chords for this version, but both could be based on a wrong source.

5 Likes
#2

I ended up doing this: https://musicbrainz.org/recording/cf9ff712-1c29-4374-bfd7-443881cb2131

3 Likes
#3

You might also consider uploading an AcoustID for the recording (using Picard), they are very useful for identifying poorly sourced media.

4 Likes
#4

You reminded me I hadn’t set up fingerprinting in beets for my collection, so thanks for reminding me, I’ll be submitting a few dozen thousand of fingerprints to acoustid soon, that song included :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
#5

That seems very reasonable under the circumstances. I would only question whether the artist type should be set to person rather than left blank. It does sound like a solo performance, but АВГАНИСТАН may still be a collective name.

You could add the youtube url as a ‘stream for free’ link on the recording.

#6

The best part of doing this is you now add seeds of knowledge for other people to find and expand.

5 Likes
#7

Excellent work, great annotation!!

I added an annotation to the artist as well:
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/8a015587-fb28-47a9-be97-ea6aa268fb3c?

3 Likes
#8

That’s exactly why I ended up going with the credited “Afghanistan” name for the artist, it’s basically the only hint we have of the artist’s name, so it lets other (hopefully russian-speaking) people search this later ^^

Thanks for the advice everyone~

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