personally i’d make them separate releases, unless it’s clear that they’re different because of limitations with the store.
for example, qobuz sometimes doesn’t display eti, and spotify has their own system, so it will look like
sparkling
sparkling (remix)
sparkling - remix
those aren’t separate releases. but in these cases it does seem that the artist (or label) intentionally changed the eti in some stores… for some reason.
keep in mind that i am notoriously liberal when it comes to creating new releases, so i don’t know if i’m the most reliable. but at the very least this is an interesting difference, and it should be noted in some way, whether it be in an annotation or with a separate release.
Listen to them. Or stick them into Audacity. Or get an AcoustID. Are they the same recording?
If same recording, then they are same release. If different audio, then separate releases.
This just sounds like an error in a shop’s track listing. Quite common. That second example especially just looks like Spotify being a bit lazy\generic with their track titles and should just be corrected to the names the artist use that seem to be shown in the Amazon\Juno version.
Also in both examples I see an old back catalogue being uploaded, so data likely has not been directly checked by the artist themselves.
The music is more important than a shop typing mistake. If you want to note the shop’s typo, add that to the annotation.
Not necessarily - different packaging makes a separate release, and I’m not sure if the artists themselves check physical releases. However, I am also rather reserved if only ETI differs.
This falls into an area without community consensus or official guidance, so you’re going to get differing opinions depending on where people land on the spectrum of “information should be entered exactly as it appears in online services” to “online info is carelessly-entered and ever-changing so it should be cleaned up per apparent artist intent.”
Barring evidence to the contrary, it seems likeliest to me that the artist/label’s intent was to use the same name everywhere rather than arbitrarily use slightly-different names on different services. Personally, I’d probably do what @IvanDobsky recommends and use a single release with “Careless (acoustic)” if everything else is identical, and then just mention the difference in an annotation.
I’m sympathetic to the “let editors enter more information if they want” argument, but creating extra releases for minor textual differences across online services has the downside of making maintenance harder… and that work falls on editors who are doing cleanup, who often aren’t the same ones who are creating the releases. (It’s probably a topic for a separate thread, but one thing that concerns me is that it’s much faster to add messy or incorrect data to MB using seeding tools than it is to fix it.)
Physical packaging leads to different release, yes. But this is not packaging. It is how someone has written up the digital track list in the digital shop. In the examples in the OP I don’t believe deadmau5 has looked at each of the shops to check how they are selling his back catalogue.
A physically different paper cover can make something collectable or interesting. I am not sure how interesting a typo like this is with a digital track list. Do digital music owners not want to know what the tracks actually are? That second example in the OP has 5 and 6 named in the same way loosing the distinction the artist originally made. Even with a physical media track list typing errors do get corrected.
hey guys thanks for the info. yea the audio is all exactly the same
I guess I’m fine either way, as long as the information is there somewhere
personally I’m often bothered by release groups with a cloudy mess of minorly varying digital releases, where it’s not clear what “defines” each of those releases. then of course there is the question of when the digital release was actually released, since newly added back catalogue stuff usually is added with the original release date…
at least in this case the label’s releases cleanly fall into two variants (amazon/juno style and itunes/spotify style). it’s possible zoolook intentionally used different ETI for different audience/store standards
one thing I neglected to mention is I’m actually not sure if the cat# and UPC are the same across both variants, since I only have cat# from junodownload and UPC from spotify…
I don’t think these were back catalogue though, I believe they were originally released like this. deadmau5 did the production for both get scraped/hitless, but I’m not sure how much involvement he had with the release; that seems to have been mostly handled by nicholas da silva (zoolook). not to mention all of get scraped was carelessly sent to distributors in lossy, mostly 128kbps mp3. That is unlike deadmau5 who is pretty vocal about being an “audiophile” and disliking lossy audio… who knows
those zoolook releases were all removed in 2018, when deadmau5 released a compilation of old material, which includes one of the productions from hitless (stealth / messages from nowhere)
to add another layer: hitless got a new release in 2019 with some tracks removed, totally different ETI, and credited to ZOOLOOK instead of nicholas da silva
and to make things even more complicated, both of those tracks are actually by halcyon441 (deadmau5’ old name) but renamed/repurposed for the hitless soundtrack
