Almost identical Spotify releases

MusicBrainz Style
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1

I’ve come across two almost releases on Spotify:


Using Spotify Web API, the only differences are that:

  • The first has the copyright holder and publisher in transliterated form, while the second doesn’t.
  • The first and second have slightly different barcodes.
  • The first has 65 available markets (countries), while the second hasn’t got it specified.

Should I enter this into MusicBrainz as two separate digital releases? If not, should I note somewhere that this alternative Spotify release exists?

2

If you find the differences interesting, and disambiguate and annotate them appropriately, I would add both.
If it’s not a big deal to you, add them as one with both links.
I don’t believe we have reached a consensus on these kinds of releases yet.

I think that since you were interested and have done the leg work already I would add them separately. The different barcodes are a reasonably significant difference imo, without that I personally wouldn’t.

3 Likes
3

When I use the API, I see:

  • The market of 4BZrEsdUTYu8EJc7Yrgq0n is [ “AD”, “AR”, “AT”, “AU”, “BE”, “BG”, “BO”, “BR”, “CA”, “CH”, “CL”, “CO”, “CR”, “CY”, “CZ”, “DE”, “DK”, “DO”, “EC”, “EE”, “ES”, “FI”, “FR”, “GB”, “GR”, “GT”, “HK”, “HN”, “HU”, “ID”, “IE”, “IL”, “IS”, “IT”, “LI”, “LT”, “LU”, “LV”, “MC”, “MT”, “MX”, “MY”, “NI”, “NL”, “NO”, “NZ”, “PA”, “PE”, “PH”, “PL”, “PT”, “PY”, “RO”, “SE”, “SG”, “SK”, “SV”, “TH”, “TR”, “TW”, “US”, “UY”, “VN”, “ZA” ] with a barcode of 859752822503
  • The market of 5XpO1aHESYiAynxPDHyvFp is [ “JP” ] with a barcode of 859752822510

As you might notice, 859752822503 is exactly “one” lower than 859752822510 (the last digit is a check digit). So I’d say MusicBrainz should record this case as 2 separate releases with different release countries and barcodes (and text script).

3 Likes
4

Do you have a screenshot of this? I tried again using the API, and I still get:
"available_markets": [],
for the second release.

image
image1108×1559 189 KB

5

I assume you’re literally using https://beta.developer.spotify.com/console/get-album/?id=5XpO1aHESYiAynxPDHyvFp&market= or another web console page which is known to lie. The correct way to use the Spotify API is to implement it yourself.

But if you haven’t/can’t implement the API yourself, these web console pages don’t appear to be lying:

https://beta.developer.spotify.com/console/get-search-item/?q=upc:859752822503&type=album&market=US - “Try It” returns 4BZrEsdUTYu8EJc7Yrgq0n

https://beta.developer.spotify.com/console/get-search-item/?q=upc:859752822503&type=album&market=JP - “Try It” returns nothing.

https://beta.developer.spotify.com/console/get-search-item/?q=upc:859752822510&type=album&market=US - “Try It” returns nothing.

https://beta.developer.spotify.com/console/get-search-item/?q=upc:859752822510&type=album&market=JP - “Try It” returns 5XpO1aHESYiAynxPDHyvFp