I think this shows a key problem we have with the concept of release countries, namely that their purpose is pretty unclear. One the one hand we have people who want to view it as a field to group releases by their origin, on the other hand we have the availability data that almost works more like a release disambiguation comment (i.e. it distinguishes a US release from a UK release).
I think the latter concept is the more useful one, as the first concept is really much better achieved by looking at the data of the artist. I imagine when @IvanDobsky wants to play New Zealand music, they want to play music made in NZ or by artists from NZ, but not a release by a US artist released by a NZ label subsidiary for legal reasons.
Historically I think I was intuitively more in the first camp, but I am more and more convinced by the host of problems we currently have that this is the correct approach.
My solution to the problem of digital release countries would have these points:
- Clean up the UI for the release country data.
- For the data displayed while browsing, I already suggested the idea of displaying a colored world map instead of a named list of countries or flags.
- The editor UI is more complicated, but I could imagine something like a two-stepped editor where you first select a date and are then presented with a multi-select list of countries (with options for starting with an empty list or with all items selected, and potentially quick-select options for specific regions like North America).
The editor could remain collapsed while not actively selected, which avoids clutter as well as the performance issue the current page has (opening the editor for an imported Spotify release with 200 release countries makes my laptop fans spin up).
- Add an ability to Picard to tag based on artist origin. Possibly even make this the default (as I would imagine it falls closer to what people intuitively expect, and certainly is more useful for organizing music).
- Come up with a clear style guide on how to deal with the different kinds of “problematic” countries.
- Countries like North Korea or Afghanistan, where it’s not reasonably possible to release most music at all
- Countries like Russia, Belarus, or Iran, which fall under very widespread but not universal sanctions
- Countries like the Falkland Islands or Curaçao, which are not or only semi-independent from another country we have as a release country
- Possibly rename the current “Release Country” field to something more clear about its purpose, maybe something like “Availability Region”
This approach has the nice property that we don’t end up special-casing digital releases compared to physical ones, where the release country is also the country of availability.