Adding covers uploaded to youtube as a standalone recordings or singles

[Cetacea]

@aerozol

It’s a relatively new shift in the music industry, but it’s common now for an artist to release a single via Soundcloud, Spotify, Youtube, etc. There’s been various discussions around disallowing these over time but it’s a losing battle as far as I’m concerned.

To be clear, my main gripe here lies with YouTube, as seen with the releases in question. The reason I’m not debating Soundcloud or Spotify is because they are clearly music platforms with musical contexts for releases. YouTube is a video streaming service, and while music recordings reside there I see issue with calling any upload (especially a video upload and not some audio with a static image/standard cover art) a release. I would agree with what has been previously discussed in this thread that this should be on a case by case basis and related to the context of the artist. When I look at the artists in question, I see a standard for how they do releases, and this does not fit the context. I’m not saying these music videos don’t belong in the database, I’m saying they contextually are not releases by these artists.

@Totosaurio3279

To me it’s just the artist releasing music outside the scope of a label.

Of course, we have [no label] for a reason. A release does not need a label to be a release, and it doesn’t need a label to be official, that’s not part of the point I’m trying to make.

@aerozol

Their choice of platform shouldn’t disqualify them from the DB/letting people tag the music with things such as release date.

I don’t care how you tag your music, I care about how that information is represented in the database. I support these music videos being in the database, but I fail to see how use of the release entry is justified. And while platform shouldn’t disqualify, I believe how they use the platform should. If an artist only ever uploads demos to their YouTube why would they all be individual releases as opposed to just standalone recordings? Why aren’t music videos for existing recordings considered new releases? The theme is, there is a way an artist uses any platform which plays into deciding what is a release and what isn’t.

As has been mentioned, we can probably all agree there needs to be a new adaptation for “video only”. While this isn’t VideoBrainz, it certainly has enough to do with music to warrant the handling of. To reference previous discussion, this seems like an appropriate solution:

@reosarevok

My standard for Youtube videos is to add a standalone recording, but that’s mostly because I don’t expect most artists to consider their stuff uploaded to Youtube as something that should appear as a single in their discography. That said, I’d love to have a “Videos” tab on artist pages where you can see their, er, “videography”.

which is similar to a comment @aerozol once made

@aerozol

Heck, maybe MB needs some extra functionality to deal with this kind of thing (eg an extra option to display youtube releases, just like we do with bootlegs, so as not to clutter the pages)

To be very clear and state my position/understanding once more, I don’t think that releases are the right place for YouTube music video exclusive recordings, but I encourage those recordings to be added as standalone in the database so that they exist, and I encourage the development of a different way of handling them that might offer them more “weight”, as that seems to be a common feeling for why they belong next to other releases.