This question is not about entering metadata, but finding metadata for digital releases.
Until last night I had only bought CD’s, I never downloaded music. Last night I bought 7 albums and a single song on Bandcamp, I brought them down as wav, flac, and mp3 to see how they would be tagged and what was included in the packages.
I love the music but was disappointed in the packaging contents and tagging. I was not expecting a booklet (would have been nice), but thought they would have been tagged better, just basic tags and sometimes ISRC’s. I searched Bandcamp for more information but little was to be had. I understand it is up to the band/artist to supply so its not Bandcamps fault, they are delivering what the artist gives them.
The questions I have for the Bandcamp buyers are:
Is this what I should expect, just songs and front cover art but most likely nothing else?
Is there a way to know just what is in the package before you buy?
Am I not looking in the correct place on Bandcamp for information?
What do Bandcamp buyers do to find information?
I am happy with what I bought but for now see more value in the package with the booklet that “may” contain information. I know some band camp offers have the physical package available but for what I bought that was only two. I will say Bandcamp is addictive in that you can listen to music for a long time that gets you searching for other music. I went there to buy 2 OOP albums and bought more.
It’s fairly common for Bandcamp pages to include some extra details as plain text on the page itself (what you’d often call “liner notes” for a physical release I guess). For example, this album includes info about the engineers, artwork, etc. That said, I doubt it has all the info in the tags at all.
Thanks, 1 out of the 7 albums had that kind of info and I created my own Word document booklet from it and other info from their home page. I think the artists need to get better at the info they place on Bandcamp. Still I am enjoying the music as I type this.
Generally speaking, yes. Bandcamp encourages the addition of more infomation and extras, but doesn’t require you to include anything.
From personal experiences, adding something like a booklet doesn’t result in more digital sales, so I’m not surprised it’s not that common. And it keeps the physical version special.
Only if the artist has taken the time to put it in the description.
Bandcamp creates the metadata from scratch based off what the artist has typed into its fields, meaning it also strips out anything ‘extra’. However it does require artists to upload them in lossless and add track titles etc. So it only has very basic tags, but also always very clean tags.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most Bandcamp buyers don’t care about detailed tags, or if they do they are a big enough fan to have the physical release (if you buy it from Bandcamp you get the digital copy with it for free). If they do care perhaps they come to musicbrainz where someone like you has added all the information they’ve found
After my last digital purchase - that didn’t warn me of the lack of the info booklet that had been praised by the artist - I compared the digital price vs physical price and decided that I had been ripped off.
(Looking at you CD baby)
From what you write it looks like most customers don’t value meta-data highly.
But this little black duck …
I have to admit that before my MusicBrainz work the booklet did not matter much to me and I use to think it odd that some amazon reviewers would be critical about the lack of information provided in a release. Now that I have the MusicBrainz “bug” I understand the importance.
