I guess you can glean the situation from this thread, but in summary:
Yes, I mostly knew this but it is good to have it confirmed.
I find the imbalance somewhat perplexing, it takes a lot more effort to create something than it does to delete it, especially when it can be on the whim of an individual user… and even more so when it can have effects like removing songs and artists completely from the database.
I did a couple dummy runs, I would say (very very) conservatively 1 in 10 tracks require a new artist to be added not to mention all the new recordings, some labels, etc, that aren’t in the database. (there are about 1250 songs in the Rainbows & Sunshine compilations alone - it’s not hard to do the math and realise that a lot of new artists would need be added)
Also now that I have brought attention to particular compilations, I’m slightly worried if I add them some ‘eager beavers’ might search them out to delete.
The thing is I can’t really see the negatives to these being in the database, and as @jmariani said they have a great use case with picard if nothing else- essentially how I came here.
Honestly, I’m leaning towards not putting the effort in for these- and that probably means I wont bother for anything else either (even if it is more ‘appropriate’ according to some users)
One way to make sure a Recording is not deleted is to have it link to something. If you make a Work at the same time for it and link it then it won’t be deleted.
Even if you don’t actually know a writer of a track, a work can still be created.
That way if someone did dislike your taste in music and delete Release then the Recordings would stay on.
My main suggestion is to add plenty of background. Annotations on the Series and Releases. Links to some of the YouTube versions that seem to exist. The database already holds plenty of radio shows and bootleg rave mix tapes. Can’t see how this series is any different to those. This is documenting history that is relevant to a large group of people
Apparently your blog releases contain tracks that we cannot find where they came from, singles or albums.
It is not really the same case as the bogus my best rock songs compilations I was mentioning:
History has shown that the people who don’t like blog compilations will do as little checking as you did here before entering or voting edits to remove them.
Usually I remove such release once I realise how much time it has made me waste, and it’s not usually this kind of releases in this topic, because it’s usually a release that is interfering with my release collection’s recordings.
While I would be quite happy if we had a blank rule that said “no piracy documentation allowed, only bootlegs allowed are live ones, and if you want to tag your pirate downloads you better find what the original sources of the music are”, I understand the community probably would generally not like that.
There seems to be a general understanding that widely available CD pirate bootlegs are legitimate MB releases. Based on that, I cannot see any argument for why widely available digital download pirate bootlegs should not be legitimate MB releases.
As per the Beginner’s Guide:
While we welcome bootlegs, we discourage adding home-made compilations or mixtapes. These kinds of releases are not widely available and any information about them is typically only useful to the individual who created them. Releases such as these are usually removed from our database. Information about pirate releases is allowed if they are not equivalent to an official release: a direct digital rip of an official CD should not be added, but a pirate release including demos or remixes in addition to the content of the official CD release can be. If you do add pirate releases, please do not add any download / purchase links to them; we want to document them, but not actively promote piracy.
So basically, something like “a selection of early hidden gems of genre X” or “a selection of good but little known covers of songs by artist Y” would seem to qualify just fine as long as they’re the equivalent to someone selling a bootleg CD, rather as someone just making a CD for their own car and not sharing it with others.
I entirely agree with the point about how annoying it is to document these releases and merge the recordings though, and I think people adding them should be asked to at least make a bit more effort with these things than people adding an official album off Spotify or Apple Music.
Adding here as well a link to the latest related discussion for anyone interested and hoping it can add something to the discussion: Edit #107315899 - MusicBrainz