STYLE-546 requests adding a URL relationship to crowdfunding pages. I’m not very knowledgeable about crowdfunding in music, so I’d like to see people’s opinions on
Whether it makes sense to link to these pages at all (the comments on Jira give some reasonings in favour of it)
Where they should be available if we add them? I’ve seen crowdfunding campaigns for albums and videos (recordings), and I guess linking to the artist/label’s profile might be useful if they crowdfund multiple things? What else? Events?
It does make sense to me to have such links (although they are fundamentally temporary, so that is a bit of a concern). I would put them on Release Groups (rather than Releases), Recordings, not Artists (that should have the STYLE-327 relationship, instead), Events (crowdfunding for live concerts, etc), not Places (even though there might be crowdfunding for building or restoring a place, that seems out of scope for MusicBrainz), not Series (if a whole tour is crowdfund, link it on the individual concerts).
One of the problems is that the product is often not delivered until the site has served its purpose. It would be far more useful to link to an ongoing crowdfunding page than the old one that resulted in the album, etc (though this would be useful). I don’t know if we should link from an artist to their projects though, and I don’t think we should create placeholder release groups for the relationship either.
The transient nature of the link is a concern. Also, it adds to releases being entered before they’re in any way released (because they’re in the process of being crowdfunded, so not even necessarily recorded yet).
To me, if an album is being kickstarted, it’s only after the project is funded that there is a valid reason to enter a release into MB (and even then only if there is sufficient data available).
[quote=“tommycrock, post:4, topic:87785”]
I don’t know if we should link from an artist to their projects though, and I don’t think we should create placeholder release groups for the relationship either.[/quote]If we can add valuable information about a band and their music, but we have to sacrifice the ‘concrete’ status that releases used to have, I think MB’s going to have to go there sooner or later anyway.
It makes life way harder for us but I guess I’d just like to see MB keeping an open mind moving forward (even if we don’t need this yet).
As an aside, I also think this information is interesting regardless of if something gets funded or not. An artist discography that abruptly ends after a failed (and hidden in MB by default) kickstarter? Just throwing thoughts at the wall, but I wouldn’t mind seeing that info in the timeline eventually…
edit: personally I’m fine with creating release groups for campaigns
As a founder of a business that crowdfunds artists :), I will note that if a funding campaign falls short of a target, many/most artists will remove/hide it so the link will be broken.
I am not very familiar with how these links would work, but would it be possible to have links at the artist level to various crowdfunding sites they are using, filtered to that artist? I’m not sure if that’s possible, but it does resolve the problem of entering a release before it is produced.
In the spirit of throwing thoughts at the wall, could we adopt events to represent specific crowdfunding projects? They often have multiple bonus downloads/streams as well as special edition releases of the final product. If we had an entity we could tie all of that together along with an annotation about how the end date was put back and the project renamed several times.
Also, linking to a “live” crowdfunding campaign would also add economic incentives for manipulating the db, as per my comment in the other STYLE-thread:
As the original poster, I think that the crowdfunding relationship could be added to artists, labels, events, series, releases and release groups. Podcasts too if we ever get a podcast entity.
Artists and labels should link to the crowdfunding profile. Projects should link to the relevant release, release group, event or series.
For new albums that are crowdfunded, I would put the crowdfunding relationship on the release group. For crowdfunded reprints or versions produced through crowdfunding, I would the URL on the crowdfunded versions of the releases.
Mother was originally published in 1989 in Japan, and after a successful crowdfunding campaign it got 4 new editions published in the United States. So for each of the crowdfunded reprints I’d add the Kickstarter campaign URL to each one.
Patronage would be for things like Patreon and PayPal. User profiles on sites like KickStarter and IndieGoGo should go under crowdfunding, if I understand your question correctly.
The most interesting part of this request is to link to ongoing crowdfunding campaigns! I don’t mind to add placeholder release groups for these, but that would be really nice to highlight them in the artist(s) page and to list them in a dedicated page reachable from MusicBrainz front page.
Keep in mind what Freso said earlier though - we don’t want to give anyone a financial incentive to add wrong data in MB to try to scam people out of their money.
Indeed, it seems difficult to avoid scams if this is open to every user. This needs to be restricted to admin (or specific type of user) and managed with stricter rules (organizations tier alike).
Nevertheless closed crowdfunding campaign pages still gather interesting data, but then the flag “This relationship has ended.” should be enforced and begin/end dates consistency required.
Added the relationship. If it becomes problematic, we can look at restricting its use somehow, but for now we’ll treat it as equivalent to purchase links (which can be added without further review at the moment). I added a ticket for autoselect (someone do it please? ).
