Many interesting points in this discussion.
No, it isn’t true. It is for stores like Qobuz, where most digital releases are exact copies of existing CDs, or Amazon, where many (but not all) of the releases are ripped from CDs they sell.
There are more and more digital only releases, having no physical counterpart.
Youtube, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, have plenty of digital-only releases.
MusicBrainz handles digital releases.
Among fields that can be improved:
- Youtube videos: standalone recording vs single, Youtube importer, clarifications (single/video/recording/…)
- Soundcloud “playlists”, being used as albums
- Bandcamp digital “pre-releases”: one or more tracks are released, before the actual album, to promote it
- Digital releases changing over the time: released once, then modified afterwards (track titles renamed, tracks swapped/removed/added, cover art modified, labelled after the band sign with a label, …)
- display could be improved, players could be embedded, etc…
About digital formats:
- there is no list of all digital formats, because new formats are created each day, at best we can have a list of most common formats.
- creating a release for each digital format is very likely to be a serious pain to maintain, as multiple vinyl color is: a typo in a track is very likely to be duplicated, and fixing it requires a lot of edits.
I’m totally against having one release per digital format, but we should have one digital release per release date/country/label/catno/cover art as we do for CDs.
Extra information could be added though: currently we have a relationship “can be downloaded for free …” (or the like), we could have “can be downloaded for free in FLAC | OGG | MP3 | ALAC at …” where formats are selected in a list of common formats.
Also, a thing i really dislike is excessive release duplication, this is happening with many recent vinyls, released in different colors (but that’s the only difference):
- we currently create 2 or more releases for each of those, with disambiguation comment to differentiate them (red vinyl, green vinyl, black vinyl)
- this leads to an absurd situation: an error concerning all releases is detected, but one has to fix it in each release, it takes time, and isn’t really user-friendly.
Digital formats are very likely to create the same situation.
So, i think MB needs a “variant” release: basically that’s a release sharing everything but few fields.
That’s not a duplicate (which is a copy), but instead a copy + overrides:
- variant releases are based on a common source, when source is modified, all variants are modified
- when a field belonging to the variant is modified, only this variant is modified
For digital releases, we can imagine:
- one base: containing everything shared
- multiple variants: OGG vs FLAC, different download URLs, different front cover, but sharing tracklist, label, release date, etc…
For vinyls in different colors, it would be the same:
- one base: vinyl with release date / label / tracklist etc…
- multiple variants: one for each vinyl color
It would help in another case: same release with unique cover arts (some artists do limited series of CD releases, having each an unique front cover)
Imho, having “variants” would help a lot in many fields, because it will reduce data duplication.