When they do not sell them as self-covers, they are what they are, new recordings.
We have these everywhere, no need to coin another fancy name, especially if it is not some by label and artist.
And the royalties sent to arrangers, well, it is the same elsewhere.
It may be more systematic to avoid them in the areas you describe, but why would we have to set a special attribute (when it is not officially written) while we already have a disambiguated new recording with distinct arrange relationships?
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cause Self covers tend to be diffrent from the original and are advertised as such heck its a diffrent band backing the track to so
One cutting of this pie:
A Japanese self cover is not a Cover in MB understanding. Adding self cover meaning to the MB meaning does not improve the database
Another cutting:
The current MB concept of Cover and the Japanese concept of self cover are close enough to allow the Japanese concept to be combined into the MB one. Doing this will result in an improved database.
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If it can be shown that the category “Self cover” has strength as a descriptor/category, then I’m thinking that the least confusing way forward for naive users is to recognise (and document) that:
“Cover” is confined to certain (cultural) genres or excluded from certain (cultural) genres.
“Self cover” is confined to certain genres, (usually so far) in specific cultural markets.
This maintains whatever utility/benefit the current category “Cover” has and captures whatever utility/benefit the category “Self cover” has.
Would we also need guidelines about whether a Self cover can be, or is, a Cover?
- “Cultural” here can mean “western”, “Japanese”, “western classical music” etc.
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This is the exact description of a new recording. 
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but it has a diffrent arrangement with a released by a diffrent company not even related to the original company
Thinking outside the box here: What if we drop the “cover” attribute altogether and instead add a “original performer” relationship to works (that would be the performer the work was written for) if such a person is known.
Then instead of “XY is a cover recording of XY” (which only tells me that I’m looking at a recording by an artist who is not the original performer) it would say “XY is a recording of XY by YZ”.
Just food for thought as “cover” seems to be a very vague term. Though I could see that “original performer” can be vague too.
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IMO a writer/artist/composer is never “covering” their own work even if written for someone else or performed first by someone else, that’s almost like saying they did not write it.
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Yes, no problem, it is like many live versions.
But anyway all those new info are already visible in their own attributes, no real need for a new self-cover attribute nor hacking the current cover attribute.
As @paulakreuzer says, I agree we could get rid of cover attribute.
It is like the release group date, it can be computer from earliest known recording or release date.
In that case, no need to add an original attribute either.
We would really gain edit efficiency and time doing so.
How to fix when wrong earliest recording?
Like we do for release group dates: adding original release would fix it.
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It’s not always the original performance that is being covered though. You can have covers of covers. The example that always gets brought up in these discussions is Marilyn Manson’s cover of Tainted Love, which is clearly based on the version by Soft Cell, who were not the original performer.
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But I am glad with letting whosampled.com trying to figure those chains out. What would be great enough would be MB showing automatically the original (the earliest known in MB ATM), which might often be less famous by a later cover but it is interesting.
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I don’t think MB should automatically assume an original version. There are too many early recordings that either aren’t in MB at all, or only exist on compilations or re-releases. In the latter case automation could get the relationship completely backwards.
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It is what we do with release groups already, they are fixed by adding original release.
Faster than adding a cover attribute to all other recordings (which is not often done btw).
We don’t need to say this is the original.
We should just display the recordings in appropriate order in the work page.
The closer to the to of the list, the closer to original, for the people browsing the page.
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I have no problem with that. I may have misunderstood your intent.
That would have to be a recording-recording relationship rather than recording-work. That might actually be a better way to represent the notion (or at least my notion) of “cover”, as I wrote upthread:
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A recording to recording relationship reminds me of what we used to have pre-NGS.
My concern is that with many stray recordings or wrong merges it it’s an endless work if even done because most time it is not done.
It is why I am often in favour of things that could be reduced from existing basic data that we already have without requiring several additional edits, reviews and maintenance, that, even for famous artists, is quite hardly ever consistently and comprehensively/extensively done (appropriately linking covers). It is natural that it is not done because it is like trying to list all events of a career, I think it cannot really ever be done, unlike releases.
And cover relationship attribute is actually a bit boring to set because it is chronologically obvious. Same if we had a non-cover attribute.
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