We’re actually seeing real issues on the site due to the long country lists:
- The page for releases in Fiji (or any other small country) taking forever to load because of it having to load all the release events for every release there (plus the usability fact that it makes it almost impossible to see what most people would think of “Fiji releases” - that is, releases from Fiji released only / primarily in Fiji).
- Editing some releases actually times out because of the struggle with the huge amount of release events.
I completely understand that “[Worldwide]” feels like a bad fit for something that we know wasn’t specifically released in Russia or North Korea or whatnot. That said, we also know that the lists atisket and other similar scripts bring up are essentially flawed - they don’t represent the countries the releases was available in at the date indicated, but the date it was released, paired with the countries where it is available now.
The country an actual release was released is a lot more significant for physical music (although possibly even for that is now less significant than before) but I get the feeling that the significance is almost nil for digital music.
As such, I’m really, really, really tempted to add a “[digitally]” release “country” that can be used together with the digital release date for digital releases that are not significantly region-locked (so, the ones that are not just “Japan-only release” or the like). That would allow us to have a sensible release event, and still allow people who care about per-country availability at any specific time to check and add the appropriate list to the annotation.
While I mostly stream my music, I can’t think of any case where I’ve cared about which countries it was allowed in on release - at most, I might care about whether I can access it from my country right now which is a different issue entirely.
Is there a reason why this is a terrible idea that should never be adopted, even taking into consideration the drawbacks of the current long lists?