Digital releases

[atj]

@elomatreb

I have yet to see an argument for tracking store availability that gives a user more information than what is currently possible with the “can be stream/purchased for download” links.

With a CD or other physical media, we can track all these minor details, because they are all verifiable in the end. If you have the CD in hand, you can just check whether it says “Booklet printed in X” vs. “Booklet printed in Y”. With digital releases, the information can change under our feet (since vendors have total control over their databases). The popular streaming platform import tool demonstrates this: It adds a huge list of country codes as release events if if its unavailable in some of them, but if you run the same import a few days later it’s not unusual to find that the list of available countries changed again, e.g. including the one that was indicated as unavailable before.

I agree and this is why I have issues with adding 180+ release events. It makes sense in a perfect system, but in the real world it doesn’t really capture any useful information.

I think many of the difficulties we have around adding digital releases are due to people trying to treat digital releases like physical releases, when they are and always will be fundamentally different. The complete control platforms have over their databases means that there is no canonical source of information for a digital release, so as submitters we are forced to create the most accurate release we can based on information from multiple sources. This naturally make many people (particularly those who are likely to contribute to MB) uncomfortable, because we expect the process to be almost completely objective.

A good example of the way in which the schemas of different platform’s databases cause problems is the “standardisation” of catalog numbers:

@atj

Both Beatport and Juno Download seem to perform some sort of internal “standardisation” to catalog numbers. Juno Download strips non-alphanumeric characters and adds a space between the letters and numbers. Beatport just strips non-alphanumeric characters. Also as noted above, sometimes Beatport just lists the UPC as the catalog number.

Using Anunaku - Stargate EP as an example:

• Juno Download - 3024 ANU1
• Beatport - 3024ANU1
• Boomkat - 3024-ANU1
• Bleep - 3024-ANU1
• Traxsource - 3024-ANU1

Would anyone seriously argue that separate releases should be created for Juno Download and Beatport because they strip the hyphen from the catalogue number?