ack, sorry to bump this thread, i hate doing that, but… i’m trying to become the best editor i can be so i’ve been reading through the forums to get the general consensus on things. i’ve probably read every post on the discourse forums lol. i notice opinions are very divided about this so i wanted to share my two cents.
i agree a lot with @aerozol about this topic. id like to give my specific point of view as someone who almost exclusively edits digital media:
i do not care about the barcodes on CDs. as far as i’m concerned it’s useless information. when buying a CD at target or goodwill or half price books or whatever, i am not going to scroll through to see what barcode number the one in my hand has. i don’t care. it makes no difference to me. BUT! i recognize that as someone who does not edit CDs often, does not rip CDs ever (don’t even have a disc drive), and has no stake in any of it, i can just ignore them and trust that the people who made the “new barcode = new release” policy know what’s best in their preferred medium and what’s best for the community.
i don’t understand the reluctance to do this with digital media.
if an artist i follow very closely releases an album on soundcloud, on bandcamp, through distrokid, and on a CD, that’s four releases to me. in my eyes they are all inherently different. i would never dream of merging a bandcamp album to its streaming equivalent and it’s genuinely pretty surprising to me that this is not universal. to me “this is a flac straight from the artist’s hard drive”, “this is something casually uploaded by the artist last minute”, and “this is widely distributed to every major streaming services” are more than enough of a difference between releases even without any other distinctions. it’s like the difference between an artist distributing their CDs through a manufacturing company, and the same artist making identical-looking CDs by burning mp3s from their laptop. if you don’t want to add all of these, don’t, that’s fine, but i will for my releases.
i feel like, also, a lot of people are saying things about “a different digital release for every storefront is like a different CD release for every store”. but pretty much no one wants a different release for spotify, deezer, itunes, tidal, napster, etc. … we store releases from different physical stores when there is a difference (“Target Exclusive”) and we should be perfectly allowed to store releases from different digital stores when there is a difference. i’ve seen releases merged for this reason that absolutely had subtle differences (the title being in all lowercase vs Proper Title Case, for example). if two CDs were identical except the back cover had different capitalization, or the features were credited differently in the booklet, i would not expect anyone would merge them.
and, to be honest, if i follow an artist closely enough to add 23 different digital releases to represent Every Streaming Service And Digital Store for one album because i found that many tiny minuscule differences between all those platforms, then i definitely follow the artist enough to maintain those releases, and no one will have to worry about it. if they really are identical to you, pick a random one to tag with and close your eyes for the rest. and if i ever drop of the face of the earth and don’t maintain them anymore, then merge away, i won’t be there to stop you.
i don’t know, i just couldn’t pass this thread again (did i mention i’m crazy and have read every post on this forum, lol) without giving my two cents. it feels like a lot of people do not see digital releases on the same level of importance as physical releases and i think that is a very dated point of view. i care a lot about having very organized and well-documented data.
(for the record this isnt a commentary on how the database can be improved on how to better handle digital releases etc. i think a lot of the ideas here and in other threads are very good. im just speaking on how people seem to handle it right now, with the current database structure)
sorry for the bump and sorry for the novel, have a great week everyone