In general, you should just enter the artist(s) as shown on the release (see the guidelines for artist credits). See Special Purpose Artist for what to enter when there is no proper artist or the artist is unknown.
I’d like to add something like this to the style page:
If a release was created without any participation from the credited artist (e.g. a remix or mashup album that was created without the knowledge of the original artist(s)), it is acceptable to instead credit the release to the artist who created it. Bootleg albums that just repackage the original artist’s work should be credited to the original artist and given the “bootleg” status.
If people agree that that’s a reasonable exception, are there any good examples demonstrating this? The only example that I have is the Kid Marscat / Secret Chiefs 3 remix album from the top of this thread, but it’s a confusing one since both Kid Marscat and SC3 (Trey Spruance) release music under a variety of artist names.
Maybe The Grey Album (credited to Danger Mouse rather than Jay-Z or The Beatles) or Q-Unit: Greatest Hits (credited to The Silence Xperiment rather than 50 Cent or Queen) would work. However, those don’t demonstrate the exception since neither of them were ever credited to any of the original artists, as far as I’m aware.
Again, my main motivation here is just to avoid having an unsanctioned remix album show up in the original artist’s discography. Maybe using the “bootleg” status would be a better way to accomplish that, but it doesn’t feel quite right for a derived work – the bootleg designation seems to typically be assigned to leaked material like NIN’s Purest Feeling or Jai Paul’s demo, or releases from bootleg/pirate labels that just repackage the original artists’ work.
I know I’ve seen many examples on Bandcamp, but I can’t seem to find them at the moment… where the original artist is credited as the release artist, that is.
a couple examples (1 [no MB] and 2 [MB]) from Vylet Pony, both singles credited to Porter Robinson. they both seem like they could be covers as well, which makes it all the more odd, actually.
I don’t recognise your examples, but to me this sounds like you have the correct aim. An unauthorised remixed should not sneak into an official discography.
Amazing work @derat. Because I’m neck deep in guidelines atm anyway I thought you might appreciate some teamwork. See thoughts mocked up below. This incorporates new feedback from @Silver_Skree, given on the Discord.
Could perhaps do with its own style page at this point
Intro:
Recording part:
Release part:
One other thing that @Silver_Skree brought up is:
“how does the question of whether or not one song is a remix of another, textually or otherwise, affect the relationships between recordings of works? Can the original track and remixed track both just be “recordings of” (no further attributes) the same Work? If not, what should be done instead?”
This relates in particular to the new ‘FELT’ example I’ve added above, which is a remix of a cover of a original. Is it a recording of [original work]?
Thoughts on the Discord were that it seems needlessly complicated to create new works, so yes, link it all to the one parent. If we agree on this then…
(He says, after absolutely scrambling to clean up the FELT recording and release in question.)
I’d prefer to say it’s “a remix of an arrangement of an original” as, after my time here on MBz, I’m very sensitive to the term ‘cover’ being applied to derivatives works that are so transformative as to warrant their own Work entity, as they often are in the context of Touhou arrangement circles The whole over-use (IMO) of the ‘cover recording’ pigeonhole is one of my highly specific and nerdy pet-peeves.
Anyway, going on a complete tangent for just a sec, I read this earlier in the thread and had to chime in:
Ok, so recently, I was cleaning up Metroid Metal on MBz, right? They were a total mess because of massive confusion across releases and recordings as to whether to credit “Stemage” or “Metroid Metal.” To recount the chronological order of events, Stemage founded Metroid Metal as a website (and what would later become a group) and started posting covers of Metroid music on there. So a standalone recording series makes sense for tracking those, right? A website isn’t exactly a release. But then! Donators to the site were mailed discs of the music that was posted on the site. I don’t have a copy of any of those discs, so I’ve refrained on doing too much editing on them aside from elucidating on what the hell they are because this is already confusing. But the songs on the site are released under Metroid Metal’s group identity but the physical discs (if we take the original editors’ words at face value) credit Stemage as the track artists.
Ssssooooo, to me, this demonstrates a principle where a Release’s track list having different credits from the Recording items that fill it makes sense, because the crediting on a release is to match the track list as-printed, whereas the artist on a Recording should be as close to the truth as possible (I guess), and those two things can be different.
Thanks for all the feedback and examples! Here’s the entirety of what I ended up with:
Remixes, mashups, and bootlegs
A recording that is a remix of another recording should typically be credited to the original recording’s artist, not to the remixer. The remixer may be credited instead if the tracklist explicitly credits the song to the remixer rather than to the original artist.
The artist who remixed the song should be linked via a remixer relationship. The remixed song’s title (including any parenthetical information like the remixer’s name) should be preserved.
A release that was created without any participation from the credited artist (e.g. a remix or mashup album that was created without the knowledge of the original artist(s)) should be credited to the artist who created and released it (the remix or mashup artist) instead of to the original artist.
Bootleg releases that just repackage the original artist’s work should be credited to the original artist and given the “bootleg” status.
The Remix, an official remix album released by Lady Gaga, is credited to the original artist, Lady Gaga.
Golden Eggs, an unlicensed bootleg album of The Yardbirds recordings, is credited to the original artist, The Yardbirds.
I decided to keep everything together in one place on the Artist Credits page. I agree that a dedicated page might make more sense going forward, so please feel free to move this text around or hack it up.
also wanted to add an example of one remix with different credits depending on who released it
the original track was released by General Mumble as a YouTube single. then The Living Tombstone remixed it and also likely put it up on YouTube. General Mumble then included it on an album “Songs About The Pink One (and others)”, crediting The Living Tombstone. less than a year later, The Living Tombstone releases “Tombstone Remixes”, and credits General Mumble, the original artist. perhaps it would be worth it to include this as an example?
Interesting. It seems like it demonstrates all the guidelines:
The release released by General Mumble is credited to General Mumble, while the one released by The Living Tombstone is credited to The Living Tombstone.
The recording is credited to General Mumble (the original artist).
The track credit differs according to how it appears in each release’s tracklist.
I worry that by demonstrating all of them simultaneously, it may be confusing for readers, though.
I could write up an annotation explaining all that, so maybe it’ll be a bit clearer
edit: actually, looking at the release, it doesn’t look like General Mumble actually credited The Living Tombstone on their release (besides parenthetical ETI, that is)… it seems someone “fixed” it at some point. ah well
The general suggestions here seem good. This is basically also looking at the whole can of worms of [STYLE-473] Decide how "unofficial" remix "singles" should be entered - MetaBrainz JIRA and suggesting to always enter them as releases under the remixer, do I understand that correctly? But with the tracks/recordings still credited to the remixed artist?
Thanks, I hadn’t come across [STYLE-473]. I’d summarize the text that I added like this:
Credit recordings to the original artist unless the tracklist explicitly credits the song to the remixer. Add a remixer relationship. If the remixer’s name is in the track title (as it often is), leave it there.
Credit releases to the remixer if they were created and released without any involvement from the original artist.
So yeah, I think that your assessment is correct. I’m happy to steer clear of the (also-contentious) bootleg status and just enter these “unofficial remixes” as official releases by the remixer, since I think that they belong in the remixer’s discography rather than the original artist’s.
This guideline is honestly unusable as it is right now, since it does not explicitly mention how to credit the original artist. There’s one example where Secret Chiefs 3 is added to the album title, but it does not tell you when you’re supposed to do it or how you’re supposed to do it. What are you going to put in the release title if you add something that’s listed as “Artist - Title (Remixer remix)” on SoundCloud?
I’m honestly pretty disappointed with this guideline, crediting the original artist consistently and setting it to bootleg makes much more sense than adding these as official releases despite them being unsanctioned. Now there’s an huge backlog that will pretty much have to be entirely reformatted, very few existing releases match this. Just do a quick advanced search for bootleg remixes and you will clearly see that this is not the norm.
To clarify, it sounds like the part that you object to is this sentence:
A release that was created without any participation from the credited artist (e.g. a remix or mashup album that was created without the knowledge of the original artist(s)) should be credited to the artist who created and released it (the remix or mashup artist) instead of to the original artist.
I think that the guidelines as currently written do describe how to credit the original artist, but only at the tracklist and recording levels. It seems like your objection is that the original artist wouldn’t be credited at the release level for an unauthorized remix or mashup album (or maybe more commonly, single) – is that correct?
This feels like it comes down to needing a stronger definition of what a release’s “artist” field is supposed to hold. My intuition is that it would usually be the artist who released the release: when I look at an artist’s list of releases, e.g. https://musicbrainz.org/artist/b76645c5-78b0-4e4c-8f95-003f40013a45/releases, I expect to see things that the artist released (and possibly also unauthorized releases that still feature basically unmodified performances by the artist, like albums released by pirate labels or fan tapings of live shows).
I think that things get weird in an online world if the only guidance is “always enter the release artist as credited on the release”. If I create an awful remix of a Garth Brooks song and upload it to a random SoundCloud account with its artist name set to “Garth Brooks” and its title set to (I Deeply Regret) My Past Hostile Actions Against Sellers of Used CDs, I wouldn’t expect that to show up as a single on Garth Brooks’s list of releases (as funny as that would be).
Crediting unauthorized releases (not counting bootlegs in the Wikipedia sense) to whoever actually released them rather than to the original artist is one way to avoid weird situations like the example I gave, but if there’s a better approach that I didn’t think of, I’d love to hear about it.
Always credit the release as it was originally credited, do not obfuscate any information. If a remix was credited like “Artist - Track (Remixer remix)”, it should be credited to the artist.
Unofficial remixes should be regarded as bootlegs.
Alert the community to a discussion in some way (blog post) before creating a new official guideline page, hold polls etc. This is my main gripe - a minority of the community participated in this thread, and the result is a guideline that would probably require editing 80% (generously low number) of bootleg remix releases currently entered in MBz. I can accept this guideline (in revised form with more detail) if consensus is shown, but this thread has not shown attention from the majority of active editors. In short, I think the appropriate action is to withdraw the guideline from the official ones for now and alert more people here. I only noticed this discussion when I saw that a new guideline was seemingly silently added.
Yes, there’s a case where the title is altered, but there’s nothing in the guidelines. At a bare minimum, it needs to say exactly when and how the original artist should be credited in the release title. It doesn’t, so I have absolutely no idea how to add anything.
It won’t, they’re hidden by default. However, this creates a pretty interesting case. If you follow this guideline and credit the track artist to the original artist with the release artist being different and setting this to official, it will be listed among official various artist releases. This gives it identical status to a various artist compilation artist licensed from the artist. I think you can see the problem yourself.
A release that was created without any participation from the credited artist (e.g. a remix or mashup album that was created without the knowledge of the original artist(s)) should also follow the credited artist as usual. If the artist credit includes the original artist(s), setting the release status to bootleg is required. If an unauthorized remix with artist credits including the original artist(s) is part of a release consisting of mostly original works, the official release status can be set with an annotation explaining what tracks are unauthorized.
This has the benefit of not requiring editing of most existing releases. It will still not show up in the artists discography except for a few various artists-only scenarios. It also should cover most edge-cases and be clear how to follow.
The whole over-use (IMO) of the ‘cover recording’ pigeonhole is one of my highly specific and nerdy pet-peeves.
