That’s not what a release event is about. It’s about where the labels distribute the release. Not whether you can access a release via a VPN or Satellite. Don’t assume every digital release is worldwide, because they just aren’t always.
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Why stop there?
Every physical release is available worldwide. (period).
Even in the remote islands of the pacific, if you have a shipping company, will be available to you.
Am I applying your logic correctly?
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Can’t we just have someone run a script that sets every release with at least 100 (or another arbitrarily high number) countries to worldwide? Those are absolutely useless since the countries change constantly and are bound to be out of date, they make every GUI dealing with them feel cluttered or even unusable, and Picard just sets everything to Afghanistan. Why do we even have a worldwide release if we don’t do that? I doubt most worldwide releases are released in North Korea.
A handy scripty for Picard…
$if($gte($lenmulti(%_releasecountries%),10),$set(releasecountry,[Worldwide]))
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No, because they aren’t worldwide. You shouldn’t be marking releases worldwide if any countries are exempt. Exceptions are countries that aren’t really countries, i.e. British Indian Ocean Territory, etc. But if it’s in every country except the US or any other major country like that, it’s not Worldwide. Just leave the country blank. Still hoping that an “internet” release country happens to solve this problem. But, yes, no longer add all the countries as a release event. I’ve just been leaving the release country blank and copy & pasting the annotation from a-tisket that shows all the countries included & excluded and adding that to the release. That way all the info as to what countries it’s officially released in or not is there for those that like this information without messing with the system. As far as your Picard issue, it doesn’t do that when I use it. I live in the US and so, I have under Options->Metadata the US as my preferred country and digital as my preferred medium and Picard tags my files as US for the country even when MB has 165 countries on the release event.
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I share your distaste of the long “near worldwide” country lists. But Picard offers a couple of options to deal with it, see the documentation:
http://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/tutorials/multiple_release_countries.html
Some background is also in
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@darkshyne The above warning was mainly directed at me when I replaced country lists with worldwide where primarily uninhabited or non-independent islands or Russia/Belarus were “excluded”.
If the search server was ready yet for such editing we probably would’ve heard about it.
I can feel you about the GUI part. Even with a faster CPU and larger screen:
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Can you point to an actual worldwide release in our database, then? We don’t really know the censorship situtation in NK, so there might not be a single one.
I’m speaking about where the release is actually distributed to by the label. Whether or not it’s actually available there who knows. Might be but only to a small amount of people, etc. I understand your point, but that doesn’t negate the fact that if a release isn’t in the United States, UK, China, etc. they shouldn’t be marked worldwide. There are many releases that might be in every country, except the US (due to being under a different label, etc.), so that’s not a worldwide release. Also, a-tisket (which is how most digital releases are added now), doesn’t count countries that don’t have Apple Music, Spotify or Deezer. If all 3 of those combined have a release in all the countries they service, then it marks releases worldwide. It’s not every single country in the world. This helps with places like North Korea, as I don’t think they officially have Deezer there. North Korea just shows up because they list it on their API as having it. When it’s not on the list, it’s not counted towards the Worldwide or not question. Many editors want to see actual distribution lists. There are many releases in release groups that are distributed to different parts of the world. Might be on one label in Europe and another label for the rest of the world, etc. Moving this information from the country events to the annotation is what is desired, but as you see above, we’ve been asked not to do it on a massive scale yet, i.e. a script.
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Tracking “release country” in terms of availability (even initial availability) seems like a fruitless task, as many have mentioned - even for physical releases.
It seems better to simply treat “release country” as “domestic origin of that specific release, if one is source-able”.
If one is not, or you’re unsure - leave it as blank. I second/third the notion that it should simply be unset for digital releases as a matter of policy.
I don’t think [Worldwide] makes any sense as a “domestic origin” - it only makes sense in terms of availability, which - as mentioned - is pointless to track since it changes so frequently and is categorically impossible for contributors to nail down in any useful way - so from that perspective I’m inclined to say it shouldn’t be a valid value, it’s literally no better than an empty value.
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I’d like to bring up these two releases who are in dire need of cleaning up their release events’ list, except every time I try to I get “Gateway Timeout: 504” error instead:
Both are digital release which in some capacity used a-tisket in their editing. Furthermore, “Starboy” by the Weekend recently went through a release merger ( Edit #103355394 - Merge releases), hence the [Worldwide] event in addition to the individual countries.
It’s because Apple Digital Masters series is linked. Every release that has this linked is doing this now. I can usually get them to go through if I do ONE edit at a time. And then have to click submit around 3 times before it goes through. I really think that maybe we should remove this series. I don’t think series was meant to be used this way, so the system seems to not be able to handle it. I no longer link the series and just mention the Apple Digital Masters in the annotation.
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Thinking about it again recently, what if we just renamed it from “[Worldwide]” to something like “[Multiple countries]”? It makes it a bit broader without being too specific, like how (hopefully) no-one reads “[Multiple languages]” or “Various Artists” as “literally every language/artist”.
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I don’t know about replacing [worldwide], but I’d be down for adding [multiple countries] as an option~
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Don’t be surprised to see changes to Spotify country lists.
[Multiple Countries] sounds like a great solution to this “problem” (if one considers it a problem).
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countries will come and go, not just on spotify.
Any scheme needs a from date and a to date for when a country existed, e.g. West Germany
And they have been on the lists this whole time. They are not new to [ISO 3166-1 - Wikipedia], which is what all the APIs on distribution for Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer, Jaxsta, etc. all use. I know they show up on the not available list on those Sony releases on a-tisket already. Deezer has had both on their APIs for a long time.
Yes, they have been. ISO 3166-1 is a list of not just countries:
from wikipedia:
ISO 3166-1 (Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 1: Country codes ) is a standard defining codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest.
The point is that the existence of an ISO code doesn’t mean record companies recognize it as an independent state and therefore a Spotify market.