Adding work relationship search not functioning when original recording has no writer credits

MusicBrainz
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Hello there,

I’ve been adding relationships to instrumental cover recordings created by Vitamin String Quartet (AKA VSQ). I’m currently working on “The Tribute to Fall Out Boy Vol. 2”.

Generally, I have no issues adding “Work” relationships (specifically, instrumental cover work relationships) between the VSQ version and the original song. However, I have noticed that certain songs will not appear when searching for a work. For example, I am trying to link VSQ’s “The Carpal Tunnel of Love” to the original Fall Out Boy song. However, I simply cannot find the song when searching for a work when adding a relationship.

I can find said Fall Out Boy song with no difficulties when performing a “recording” search with the standard search engine and the recording relationship page, but not with the work relationship search bar.
Directly pasting the original recording’s MBID into the work relationship search window simply tries to create a recording relationship between the two instead. Since this is an instrumental cover version of the original song, using a recording relationship would not be appropriate by MusicBrainz style guidelines.

I have a feeling this is due to the fact that the original has no currently attributed writer(s) at the moment.
Does a recording HAVE to have writing credits in order to have a work relationship with another recording? Is there a way to bypass this writing credit requirement? I don’t want to have to tediously research and add writing credits for recordings simply to link other recordings to it.

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It looks more like there is no Work entity for that song. In the Recordings tab for Fall Out Boy, I found two recordings of that song.


Neither of them have a Work attached and I don’t see one on Fall Out Boy’s Works tab.

Edit: When I look at a couple example of the Infinity on High album, I only see three songs with works attached.

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Yeah, not all works have been created yet :slight_smile: Feel free to create these and link them to both the originals and these new recordings.

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Oh I see. I wasn’t really aware that “recordings” had to be designated as “works” in order to have a linked work relationship with another song. Thanks!

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“Work” is a separate entity from “Recording”. I like to think of it as: Work represents the sheet music, while Recording represents the tape with the mix of the recording sessions that is used to create the album.

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There is a list of the different entities in MusicBrainz with links to read more about them here:
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Entity

(The list is slightly off though (e.g., “Artist Credit” isn’t an entity). I’ll probably make a GCI task for it and hope some student will help clean it up… :sweat_smile:)

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“Artist” needs some work too. Just off the top of my head, I’ve added photographers, painters, journalists and preachers. So the wording that seems to limit the scope to “music professionals” is a little too narrow.

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I’ve used the wording similar to “an artist associated with the music industry” when trying to explain to some of the GCI participants.

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