Digital releases

The 3 releases are perfectly correct, since either cover art or tracklist differs. Why would this be “offensive” ?

But do you think it would make sense to create one release per format available at Bandcamp for https://musicbrainz.org/release/9adcff14-7dba-4ccf-a6a6-298bcde3dd46 and https://musicbrainz.org/release/806e67c4-d3bc-4c23-9e98-65c06cd26057 ? I guess not.
MB is lacking some infos here: in which digital format each release is available.
Note that the bonus track when some amount is reached is quite rare, but following cases are happening very often with digital releases:

  • digital release initially has N tracks, M tracks are added later, no url change (Bandcamp)
  • digital release has bonus tracks varying depending on the source (iTunes vs spotify vs Bandcamp)
  • digital release can be streamed, but the downloaded archive contains more tracks (very often on Bandcamp)
  • cover art is modified after initial release
  • digital release is “labelled” after a while after an initial “no label” release, but the release is not modified (same tracklist, same cover art, same release date, label is added in annotation or smt)
  • each track has a different cover art, album its own
  • different websites propose the same album with different tracklist (not by intent, but by error)

All those cases (and few more) are always non-obvious to handle, and not always well managed on MB side.
If you combine digital audio formats plus those various cases, we can quickly have a lot of digital releases for one album, and “too much information may kill information”…

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