Clarifying "Release" in a streaming world

On the ticket tracker @Jim_DeLaHunt wrote:

However, there is another paradigm for artists these days: the Artist who releases via youtube videos, non-album tracks on websites, or via streaming services. Examples are Pomplamoose and Post-Modern Jukebox. They started by releasing performances as Youtube videos. When they built a following, the CDs eventually came. But an Artist page which tells the story of these Artists will have to find a way to list their Youtube videos or streaming tracks as well as their CDs.

I’m not sure I understand what the problem is here. If these artists have Youtube releases that would not be considered ‘singles’ you can enter them with release type ‘other’, they will then be displayed at the end of the discography under the ‘other’ section.

The problem is that the current UI and database structures of MusicBrainz reflect a lingering bias towards physical mass-duplicated physical media (primarily CDs, also LPs, cassettes, DVDs, etc.) as the main and most important product of a musician’s musical output. That mindset is now obsolete for some musicians, because their main and most important product is entries in streaming music services.

The ticket concerns a UI redesign of the Artist page. The point which I am trying to make for the designer is to try to set aside that bias towards mass-produced physical media, and come up with a design which works well for either an artist primarily releasing physical media, or an artist primarily releasing streams. A design which can give only CDs primary place, and always relegates streaming releases to an “other” section at the bottom, will not serve well those artists primarily releasing streams.

Are artists who are centred in the new paradigms of music distribution, which are digital and streaming and include video as well as audio, just afterthoughts to MusicBrainz? Or does MusicBrainz want to do as good a job for the new paradigms as it does for the legacy paradigms? I think that’s the big underlying question here. Doing a good job for the new paradigms will be difficult. It will require good design and new code and new style guidelines and hard work. But the first step is to decide that we think it is important to try.

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By definition, any category named “other” is of very limited use. If there were a good category for these streaming releases, they could be more prominently displayed on artist pages. If an artist has no traditional albums, singles or EPs, the steaming category would probably be on top. Or we could decide that a track released on YouTube is like a single and use that category.

So I think we should come up with a definition and a title for a category of streaming releases, or decide that tracks on YouTube and Soundcloud and the like are like digital media singles with just one track.

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I agree with all this, do you have specific improvements in mind that could be included as part of the UI overhaul. Keep in mind that @chhavi doesn’t have that much experience editing MBz and practical suggestions would be really helpful.

in other words: released to the public on the artist homepage, on a certain date, with a certain text or image or both. That too is a release. So what if it wasn’t on a pretty disk, so what if his website isn’t spotify.com or itunes.com .

The solution here is simply to define the type of release. Maybe we need more subtypes to “digital release”.