In the future, if I were to upload these individual collections of each Eurovision year’s live performances to the Internet Archive as precedent, how should I handle cover art? Would I need to make bespoke album covers for each release that are sensibly different than the official album covers and source it as designed by myself using available official resources?
I think it’s up to you. You could not bother with artwork at all. If you do, consider the copyright issues of using other people’s work. Bootlegs which seems to be the closest thing to what you propose, either create their own covers using fan photography or original artwork. The original contemporary bootleg had an almost blank cover Great White Wonder - Wikipedia
Note: I am not a lawyer and do not play one on TV or the internet 
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I might be late in replying here (even though I did contact @metaphorraccoon through PM after I entered a bunch of mergers for recordings that came with their submissions). But based on the acoustID fingerprints that came with these recordings I suspected that many of these might have been sourced from the torrented Eurovision Song Contest 1956-2009 All Songs-EmpAta collection. I’m not suspecting metaphorraccoon of having based their submissions on that torrent, rather I’m aware of the outreach that this collection had among the ESC fan community: from the audios showing up while searching on sites like MyFreeMp3Juices, to unofficial fan-uploads on Youtube, lots of user-submitted data on acoustid.org, even them showing up on official digital platforms like Spotify whose ‘officiality’ I’m very doubtful of given the very ‘Youtube-rip’ quality of some of those audios.
Luckily, that torrent was still being seeded even after all these years, so now that I’ve downloaded it, I’m even more convinced that many of those audios were ultimately sourced from that same collection. After running the Scan option on those audios on Picard, I’m getting the same acoustID fingerprints that showed up on metaphorraccoon’s submissions (that is, the range of ESC editions between 1956 and 2009 which were covered by that torrent).
(From here on I wrote many specifications on the audio files I downloaded, so if you find it all too boring you can just skip this and jump to the last paragraph of this post.)
Many Eurovision songs were recorded so many times that it’s impossible to make a distinction simply from looking at the title and the artist (studio recording vs. live, English vs. native language, original recording vs. re-recordings that said artist made many years later). This collection contains a few mistakes too, such as crediting the wrong artist [1][2] (these two linked ones are specific examples where the songs were performed in Eurovision by an artist different from the ones who released the official studio recording) or even a wrong song (unrelated to Eurovision)[3][4].
Notice that on the ‘user-submitted data’ column on each of the acoustID pages that I linked above, there’s at least one or two submissions of the format “Eurovision [year] - [host city]” or something similar which is pretty much how the album-field is tagged on the audio files as provided by this torrent. Almost all of them have at least one MB link (with no artist or title specified) which lead to no valid recording (getting the Recording Not Found message instead) which I believe are remnants from metaphorraccoon’s additions that were later deleted.
My point for writing all of this is that I had the idea of submitting this torrent as a legit release on MB with indicated Bootleg status as it’s obviously not official. (I could have already done this, except I thought of sharing my idea here fist before causing yet another suspicion of the database being bombarded with bogus annual ESC compilations). AFAIK, the convention here on unofficial music collections distributed online is that they can be accepted on MB if they have enough visibility and have a stable unchanging tracklist; it’s how the Indie/Rock Playlist (one example that often shows up on my subscriptions) got accepted despite it being mainly playlists posted on major streaming platforms. Since adding them (especially choosing the correct recording out of those existing on MB) is going to take some time, I’m planning on submitting each of the folders (which correspond to each of the ESC years) one by one, only to merge them into one multiple-media release when I’m done.
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I think our conclusion was that such a torrent existed it could be added, and your knowledge about this is impressive, so this sounds great to me. Just be sure to explain the situation on your note, you can even add a link to this post.
This is what worries me (and that the previous user didn’t do). To add the release, you have to add the recordings, which means you have to recognize them among all the many versions released in over half a century… It’s even possible some have never been released officially and were taken directly from the TV recording. I don’t envy you, but I wish you luck. I do think it would be by nice to have a comprehensive collection like that on MB, especially if it is influential in the ESC community.
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Hi! EmperorAtahualpa here. I’m the same guy who created this Eurovision torrent back in 2009. And what can I say…I’m impressed that my work still kind of lives on! So it wasn’t for nothing. 
I put a lot of work into it back in 2009, I remember. On another page here on metabrainz I read that I also made a couple of mistakes in the collection, but hey, what did I know, I was just a stupid kid trying his best working with the sources I could find on the internet back in 2009. I uploaded many other torrents on Demonoid as well, many were related to football as I remember. Some time after that, I became passive in the torrent community, but now I’m back and who knows I might contribute again. I just thought you guys might appreciate reading this message and reading your messages and I just wanted you to know that to read all of this in late 2024 is bringing a smile on my face. So anyway, peace all and take care! 
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It is impressive a torrent you made 15 years clearly still matters this much. I hadn’t followed @DenizC’s work since this discussion, but the care he put into this (here) is mind-blowing. He seems to have become both an ESC and EmperorAtahualpa scholar.
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Thanks a lot @blackteadarkmatter and especially @EmperorAtahualpa whom it’s nice to see still alive and well. To be honest, I’m not too familiar with the rest of EmperorAtahualpa’s work, but no matter the mistakes the ESC torrent was still very important to me back in the day as a music enthusiast and Eurovision fan.
As one can read on discussions like these, the inclusion of unofficial non-physical media like these into the DB can be quite contentious, but being well aware that the torrent reached to considerably greater audience among the online ESC fandom, I thought it might be worth documenting on MB.
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