Artist: ななひら (Nanahira)

MusicBrainz
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Hello! I am currently (trying to) create releases for ななひら (Nanahira), specifically her covers, starting with YouTube (official playlist here), since those are majorly missing from her discography here.

I have created an entry I think is correct:

https://musicbrainz.org/release/4ec06301-b092-4833-8fbd-7550649ef971

It is however ambiguous to me whether the illustrator should be within the release, recording, or both..

Currently these two entries have pending edits and a bit of the same confusion:

https://musicbrainz.org/release/5cc887bf-0067-4728-922c-957c732a4e42

(I do not know whether the release’s artist should be credited exactly the same as the track is, featuring both artists, or kept as just ななひら since it was from her channel. I think the latter is problematic because it makes it not show up on both artist pages)

https://musicbrainz.org/release/0efe7416-749b-4845-b659-63280fee102c

As for existing entries, there are two which are in a similar situation:

https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/5a238855-3805-4cbc-81d9-18215dc4d795

https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/dc620db8-17de-44fd-9bb5-20521d11dc93

I think the second is mistakenly marked as a single, I feel like “Other” applies to this sort of entry more, but feel free to correct me on this (or anything)

If my current questions could be answered and checked by someone more experienced than me (these are my first releases created, really), I would appreciate it. I plan on going through her entire cover history that I know of, but I would like to know beforehand if I am doing things correctly to avoid later headaches, since that figure might get into the hundreds. I’ve been a pretty big fan of hers for a while so this is mostly just fun for me, it’s quite a good bit of history that hasn’t been categorized properly, I think!

Kind regards, rini -✩

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To try to answer my own question about the proper format of things, after reading some more:

Recording

  • of video type
  • artist is as specified in the title
  • has the vocals and vocals arranger and other metadata expected from audio recordings
  • if it is a new MV (as it happens often), should have the illustrator, animator and related types
  • has the cover recording relation of the original song; for re-used MVs it can be assumed the illustrator is that of the original MV
  • (?) does not include the streaming URL

Release

  • same artist credit as Recording
  • of video type and “Other” (could be improved by this suggestion, but it should not be a Single)
  • has the illustrator of the thumbnail; possibly the same as the Recording
  • (?) has the streaming URL of this release, possibly multiple if they are identical (i.e. some older entries are also officially available on Niconico/ニコニコ動画, but are the same)
  • has the publish date of the oldest URL, in UTC timezone
  • (?) does not have a set country

(Again, corrections welcome)

I am confident in this format except that possibly the streaming URL could be in both entries and that the country could be set to Worldwide/XW. As for having multiple URLs, the oldest URL is the canonical source and others are late re-uploads. If they are not identical then it might warrant a separate release in the same release group, but I do not think this happens.

I will also try to make reference of Twitter announcements for the publish dates (since YouTube does not tell me the exact hour to correct for timezones) and possible extra credits, but I don’t know how far in the past these go

Other than this there is some possible confusion for covers which reuse the original song MV, for example, ななひら’s きゅびずむ/きゅびびびびずむ covers only have an original illustration for the thumbnail, whose illustrator would be credited in the Release but not Recording

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This thread might as well be used for denpa songs, as it is most of this artist’s fanbase ( ^o^)／

Concerning “Cubism”/きゅびずむ, it has an existing entry for the original as well as a Recording with no Release for ななひら’s cover:

https://musicbrainz.org/release/11e8628b-5208-4d53-a361-4d264c813be8

https://musicbrainz.org/recording/0fc6b7d8-c42c-4fc8-8e61-b38c77f2749a

I however don’t understand why it has been split into a Work, when Recordings can have “cover recording” relationships to other Recordings, and I am sure the instruments are the same audio in covers

@hasezoey since it seems I keep running into entries created by you, this thread might interest you ^▽^

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howdy, and welcome to the world of adding YouTube videos as releases~

I can answer more later, but I wanted to get the big ones out of the way

  • video URLs can (and probably should) be added to both the release and recording (I’d at least do the release)
  • I personally leave the primary release group type blank (i.e. not Single or Other) due to the ongoing style discussion you linked above, but many editors do add videos under Other (personally, I’d eventually like to see these as Single + Video, but we’d need a new secondary type for that)
  • works are a different entity type, I’ve always thought of them as representing the sheet music. that is the proper way to link covers to the original. that said, there’s currently no way (at least to my knowledge) to link covers that use the same instrumental recording, like an artist singing over the official instrumental
  • if multiple artists are credited in the video title, they should both be credited in the artist field, even if it was only released on one of their YouTube channels
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I feel like it is hard to dig this for every song, but it is particularly common in J-Pop and adjacent scenes for authors to provide the instrumental tracks for their own songs. In the きゅびずむ song for example, there is a Drive link in the description for a Karaoke version. Other times this is only available elsewhere, but Utaites tend to only sing over these and possibly have the help of someone else for mixing/arrangement.

Probably, the best thing to do is have Recordings for these (not necessarily with Releases, I would argue they never quite are released) and not Works. I think “cover recording of [original]” is a simple enough replacement while these don’t exist.. maybe

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Does this still show up in the artist’s MusicBrainz/ListenBrainz page? I didn’t know that was an option

Anyways, I could be wrong about Works since they seem to be very broad (they could technically exits for everything? but doesn’t mean they’re necessary to create), but these answers are very helpful >▽<

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It seems I was very confused about works because I didn’t quite understand the edit relationships UI, they need to be created for the writer/composers to be credited as well. I’m not exactly sure now if Recordings for the instrumentals should be created (they do exist after all)

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New recordings are always created for (simplistically speaking) ‘different sounds’. An instrumental track sounds different, so it’s a new recording. Same with a changed chorus or mix, live recording etc. The exception is different masters, which MB does not separate.

It’s a low threshold for recordings. Whereas new works I generally only create if there’s a need (e.g. a different composer or writer relationship that needs to be added).

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the only required fields on any entity are bolded, tho it’s not super obvious from the editing interface. and yes, they do show up on the artists’ pages, at the top as “Unspecified type”:

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