Documenting a occasionally-updated Bandcamp album

MusicBrainz Style
, , ,
1

MusicBrainz has a release group for Vintage Story OST by Lo-Phi, available (as far as I know) solely at Bandcamp. As the Bandcamp page shows, the album is sometimes updated, with new track additions, changes to the titles of previously-released tracks, and changes to the music recordings themselves of existing tracks. The artist even maintains a changelog in the Bandcamp album description, with version numbers and dates as if the album is a computer program.

So far, according to the changelog there were three times when the music of an existing track was modified in some way:

v1.8.5 - [Jun 28, 2018] Remastered ‘The Seraphs’ track to be louder

v1.8.7 - [Oct 11, 2018] Slightly altered ‘Quirky Tavern’ and ‘Cultured Tavern’ to have less abrupt transitions

v1.14.11 - [Jun 3, 2020] Added
‘Summer Day’, ‘Roots’, ‘Resonance Archive - The Invention’, and
‘Spring,’ also lowered volume of ‘Quirky Tavern’ and ‘Cultured Tavern’

How should this be handled?

  • Should every “version” be its own release in the release group? This is already somewhat the status quo in the release group, with 4 different releases (out of 15 documented “versions” in the Bandcamp descrition changelog.) If so:
    • In the case a track title changes in a new “version”, should the title of the associated work stay the same?
    • Should the release date be the date when the “version” was publicized as shown in the changelog? The only other date that makes sense is the date of the album’s initial release, June 11, 2007.
    • Should all releases that are not the latest get “Withdrawn” status? The old releases could be considered replaced releases.

I am leaning towards “yes” to all these questions because that seems most consistent with the style guide on releases, in particular the section about replaced releases. That does mean the release group for the album would get filled with many releases.

1 Like
2

If it’s helpful, here is a similar release that I have edited :slight_smile:

Basically, I agree with all your points!

1 Like
3

The only thing I would add is that disambiguations and annotations on the releases would be lovely to help future editors understand not to merge them. Ideally on the revised recordings as well.

3 Likes
4

I agree. Specifically, I would add the version number to the disambiguation comment for each release. You can add aliases to works and recordings as needed. Since these are works in progress, the latest name, rather than the original or working title, should be the primary name for a work.

Also, mark the URLs “ended” for earlier incarnations of the album, and set start and end dates as precisely as you can.

When writing annotations, pretend that the Bandcamp page is already offline and that your annotation is the only document. What needs to be said? (Don’t copy and paste changelogs, though. You have to use your own words!)

2 Likes