I’ve been working on songs from the brony music community, and it’s common there for people to mark songs as “Artist Name Remix” when arranging an existing work: for example, Vicious Lies (Stars In Autumn remix) (on MB) uses the melody of and samples the vocals from d.notive’s original (on MB), but the instrumental track was rewritten in a different style and Stars in Autumn “rerecorded” it (whatever the terminology is for electronic music) himself. I’ve realized that my issue with the format described in this recent thread stems from this usage of the terminology, where the “remixer” is closer to a cover artist, and while I can appreciate the reasoning behind it in the standard case, I’m not sure it’s the best way of handling the idiosyncratic brony “remixes”.
While I’m still mostly in albums of original compositions, what do y’all think is the best way to handle recordings like this? My take would be to treat them as covers despite the wording, and add a “cover recording of” relationship to the original work (unless it’s sufficiently innovative to add a second “arrangement of” work) along with a “samples” relationship to the original recording, but credit the arranger rather than the original composer in the “Artist” field. That does wind up dropping some of the “printed” title information, though.
For that matter, what is “sufficiently innovative”? Would the above example warrant that “arrangement of” work? I think I get the difference between arrangement, revision, and based on, but the documentation could certainly be a bit more clear on when each apply.
If the music is a new composition based on the original themes, a new work might actually make sense, actually. I guess I wouldn’t add a new work if you’d call this an “arrangement”, but I would if you’d call the guy the composer (after all, we create new works if someone adds new lyrics to existing music, so it should also apply the other way around).
I don’t think I’d go as far as “composer”, so I’ll stick with a single work and the recording-artist “arranger”. Given that, though, is the work-work “arrangement” just for classical music, or does it have some use outside that domain? Either way, thanks for the help!
Also, I realized my link to the second video was broken. It’s fixed now.
What’s the difference between that and the pop music it shouldn’t be used for, then? It’s not that I don’t see the difference between the domains, but I’m wondering where exactly the line is drawn, and why.
Take for example, Tetris’ “A-Type”. It’s based on “Коробейники”, but for the purposes of copyright the author is considered to be 田中宏和. This is the rarest case. The more common work-work relationship you’ll see in this area is when someone creates an arrangement with original lyrics.
I guess my question is when should something be marked as a cover of an existing work, when should a new “arrangement of” work be created, and at what point is it better to use “based on” (even your Tetris example uses the last). At this point, though, it’s mostly academic as “cover recording” and “instruments arranger” on the recording seems to cover almost all of what I’ll be working with.
I think it should cross some threshold of transformation. Usually when I have to create a new work instead of re-using the old one it’s because of a major change, like original lyrics or it consisting mainly of new music only referencing the old work.