Hello, I’m a new MusicBrainz user (joined last week) and just wanted to share my experience as a newbie and my confusion as to how to add digital releases, which is the vast majority of the releases I add.
TL;DR: adding digital releases is confusing for a newbie with no consensus on how to handle release events and lack of official, up-to-date docs about this
I’ll admit when I first started adding releases I didn’t read through the documentation or style guide and just jumped straight in, using [Worldwide] for the release country because I naïvely assumed ‘of course it’s worldwide, it’s on Spotify/YouTube/Bandcamp’.
I then started noticing the a-tisket-generated annotations and long country lists on many releases, and spent some time finding this tool. Now, I use a-tisket to add releases and update existing releases (even wasted an hour writing a little script to help me with this before I discovered texke’s userscript) with annotations and release events, assuming that this was the preferred way to handle digital releases given how commonplace this is.
Then, I stumbled across this thread and took the time to read through the entire thing. I’m now more confused as there doesn’t appear to be a consensus on what to do.
I’m sure you’re all aware of this, but a user trying to figure out how to handle digital release events will probably consult the style guide and read this:
If you are entering a digital release, the country will depend on where it is available from. Pages like Bandcamp, SoundCloud and other similar sites have no region restrictions. In this case, it is safe to set the release to [Worldwide]. For releases from shops like Amazon or iTunes, that have region restrictions, it is safest to choose the country of the shop (if you’ve bought it in the French iTunes store, use France). Remember that you can always leave the field blank if you are not sure!
As such, it’s understandable that they would use a-tisket and those long country lists in order to reflect where the release ‘is available from’. It’s a little concerning to me that this issue has been debated about for years yet the docs haven’t been updated and users conforming to the style guide are having their edits rejected.
FWIW, here are my thoughts on this issue:
- The accuracy of the MB DB shouldn’t be compromised by aesthetic desires to shorten release event lists or some finding the UI of the web interface ugly — I believe MB’s priority should be its value as a machine-readable source of reliable information
- However, as many have pointed out,
available_markets etc. returned from vendors’ APIs do not accurately reflect the release country and change over time, creating issues for releases added to MB years after the initial release date
- The web UI should have an option to display many release events with the same date as e.g. ‘[Worldwide] excluding Russia and Belarus’
- If we decide availability of digital releases is something we want to store in the MB DB, maybe there could be a property on releases that stores what countries the release is available to on a particular date, kind of like
"availability": [{"date": "2020-01-01", "countries": [/* all countries */]}, {"date": "2022-03-01", "countries": [/* all countries excluding Russia and Belarus */]}]. This could be a way of accurately modelling the information we have about the availability of releases at a given time, especially when the countries that the release was available to at the time of release is unknown
- However, I’m not sure this level of information would be useful to anyone and it seems excessive
- Alternatively, maybe a property
as_of on release events to represent when the availability information was retrieved, with that property ideally being as close to the release date as possible
- Then again, is it MB’s job to record such fine-grained information about the various geo-blocking and political events resulting in North Korean, Russian, Belarusian residents etc. not being able to access some digital releases? I agree that for releases only available in a handful of countries (e.g. Japan-only releases) there should be a release event for every country, as it seems like the artist/label’s decision to have exclusive releases for particular countries. But for the Russia/North Korea issue, is the artist wanting/intending to release to all countries except Russia, or is it because they are simply unable to given the current political climate?
- Maybe it’s worth distinguishing releases only available in a few countries from releases available in all but a few countries. I like the idea of an [Internet] pseudo-country for the latter
Sorry if none of that made sense I didn’t mean for this to be so long.
then (for now) dedicated/excluded countries/labels go in annotation.
).
