In 2012, artist SKisM released The Division EP, and leading up to the release of the EP, he released 4 singles.
One of those singles, “Red Heat” had an error where the songs were longer than intended. Both songs start out normally, and after some time, they would stop and restart from the beginning again.
Here’s a visual representation of the issue:
Track 1 “Red Heat” is 4:33 long, but was originally distributed with the length of 4:41.
And track 2 “Red Heat (TC remix)” is 4:43 long, but was originally distributed with the length of 5:40.
This error was corrected at some point after the release, and now the songs play out normally everywhere.
Now the question, does this fall under Error correction and artist intent? or should both versions of the releases / recordings exist in MB?
I can see arguments for both - on one side, this was clearly not artist intent, and was later corrected by the artist / label. These longer versions with errors are not (officially) available anywhere.
On the other side, having both on MB would let people tag their longer versions if they happen to have those. This is how I came across this problem in the first place actually, I’ve had the longer versions saved on my hard drive for years, and when I got around to sorting them out on my library I noticed the errors.
Now, clearly these are errors and not any kind of special or alternate versions, so I would imagine any fan of these songs would prefer to have the versions without the errors, but you never know.
Currently, the recordings have the longer lengths, both at the single level and at the EP level
So I think there’s 3 potential options here:
- Option 1: Set the track lengths to the real lengths on the existing releases.
- Option 2: Make new releases with the same recordings, with the correct lengths.
- Option 3: Make new releases with new recordings, with the correct lengths.
Option 1 would fall under error correction, we follow what the artist intended and anyone with the longer versions can look at an annotation somewhere explaining the situation.
Option 2 would keep the history of the longer versions, but wouldn’t acknowledge them as different recordings, just as differences in track length.
Option 3 would mean these versions with errors are valid as separate recordings.
Personally, option 3 seems like the worst to me. Since this was just an error, I would go with option 1, but I guess this is why I’m opening this thread 