Best course of action for releases that don't exist

MusicBrainz
#1

Recently, I’ve noticed 4 strange releases created:

As far as I’m aware, these releases don’t exist. I think the submitter may have confused the concept of a release and a recording, and created releases for these, although I’m not sure why they would have done that either, since recordings for these already exist, and are included in the correct releases already.

I’ve created merge edits for the duplicate recordings created as part of these releases, but I’m not sure what to do about these releases - since they just don’t exist, is the best solution here to just delete them? Or is there something else that should be done with them?

1 Like
#2

If it was never released as a single, just removing the releases seems fine to me :slight_smile:

#3

Cool, thanks for the advice! The documentation seems to really discourage deleting whereever possible, so I just wanted to be 100% sure :stuck_out_tongue:

#4

Note that such pseudo-singles may be artifacts from Spotify and other such digital vendors, where it’s common practice to create such single-track extracts from other releases to increase exposure of that specific song (I think these are also automatically created, but I’m not sure). The usual giveaway is the lack of a specific cover art, where it’s usually just the same as the larger release it was extracted from.

I don’t think we have a specific guideline for these releases, but my intuition would be to say that they do not meet the threshold for being considered proper releases.

#5

Personally I think these singles are legitimate, if they’re notable enough for someone to bother adding them.*

Since these have art and ‘decent’ release info I thought they might be one of these as well, but you’ve asked the original editor, which is all you can do, since no source URL is given. If they don’t reply I would also just remove the releases :slight_smile:

No need to keep ‘maybe it did exist’ stuff around to confuse everyone.

*unless they are all auto generated?