Extra title information for live release

https://musicbrainz.org/edit/120414592

My edit was marked as No by the style guidance, which states “For recordings, follow the same guidelines, with the exception of live performance data. For that, follow the specific guidelines for live recordings”.
From this, I thought it was about Recording that the live information should not be given in the title. So I thought it was possible to add (Live Version) to the track list, but was I wrong?

As has been discussed here before, I believe that a live ETI should be given in accordance with the notation of digital services.

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I think that the disagreement on that edit doesn’t directly concern the live recording guidelines.

Rather, editors are disagreeing about whether “(Live Version)” ETI that appears at the end of every track title and doesn’t distinguish between tracks on the release should be preserved, or whether it should be deleted per the “additional information that is not part of the title and also not intended to distinguish the track should be removed” section of the ETI guidelines.

There’s an extra question (for me, at least) about the extent to which data from online storefronts needs to be copied exactly when there’s different (and arguably cleaner) data on a physical release. Personally, I tend to favor data from physical releases when it’s available since the graphic designers who create the packaging for those often seem to care more about correctness and formatting and are less likely to be affected by the whims of Apple, Spotify, Google search ranking, etc. It also feels unlikely to me that the intent is for online and physical versions of the same album to have different track titles.

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As @derat says - my No vote was from having the same ETI on every track. Similar if it says (Remastered 2012) or (Live Version) it is not needed when each track is that same ETI.

Especially as in this case the album is clearly a live album as live is part of the album title.

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Please provide style guidance indicating this.

pretty certain thats on this page
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Recording

But it’s telling me that doesn’t exist anymore :thinking:

Docs sometimes need a refresh for them to reappear. We’re not sure why, but we’ll migrate to a different system soonish hopefully anyway. That’s for recordings anyway, the question is for tracks.

Not everything is based on explicit guidelines, sometimes we edit based on common sense and what editors mostly agree on. This is one of those cases, unless I’m misremembering and we explicitly say it somewhere. It’s a similar reasoning to why the guess titles code automatically removes “(bonus track)” - it’s useless.

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Experienced editors voted yes, no, and abstain on that edit, so I’d venture that the guidelines could be improved by providing more guidance here – otherwise, the data often goes back and forth depending on who shows up to vote. :slight_smile:

Let me know if I’m misinterpreting your comment, but would you support an item like the following being added to the “Some cases of additional information that is not part of the title and also not intended to distinguish the track should be removed:” list in the ETI guidelines?

  • “Song (live)” on a live release containing no non-live version of the song: just “Song”, with the recording edited per the live recording guidelines
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https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle
If the release actually says (Live Version), as indicated by the “Follow Artist intent” in the Style/Principle, I think it should be added to the track listing (except for recordings).

It can also be considered as the artist’s intent that the physical release and the digital release are differently labeled.

The following examples are from both physical and digital releases.
As shown in this example, there are various patterns of indicating live information, which can be considered as the artist’s or company’s intention.

Thanks for the topic, but you could better have posted under the existing topic you linked, instead. :wink:

We used to not have guidelines for obvious things.
But for some years, the guidelines are progressively covering this kind of obvious things, more and more.
So maybe there will be something about that, soon, now.

No, we’re talking about release tracks, here.
The recording can have the live information in either title or comment, it’s OK.

Here it is not artist intent, because it’s only on the e-shop tracklist, not on the real CD.

e-shop tracklist does not equal artist intent.

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had a bit of a check around we don’t actually seem to have a guideline on how to format tracklists either - just how the recording should be styled

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No, the e-shop cannot change the name of the track listing without permission, it is the artist’s or label’s intention.

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Why do they allow (if they really even care) duplicate the live info on each tracks in e-shop but not on their real CD?

Because they don’t have MB recording live relationships and comments?

I feel that is just as confusing. This is not about live vs non-live tracks. It is about anything obvious a digital shop identically slaps on all the tracks. Not just (live version) but also (remastered 2012) and other such items that appear on every track.

These are sales gimmicks to make the item look different in the shop. Clearly not how the actual artist titled the track. Just how a marketing guy named it.

It is especially pointless on a live album when the album is clearly titled as live.

If tracks are from different gigs and the ETI names the separate gigs - then ETI is needed. When all it does is repeat what is already in the title on every track - that ETI is not needed.

Something more along the lines of: “If a common ETI phrase is repeated on every track of a release it should not be part of the track title.

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Why do you change from what is actually released to what we want without our permission?

https://musicbrainz.org
MB is supposed to be “The ultimate source of music information”, but this is not the correct way to record release information.
I think that in order to achieve this goal, the track listings should be written in the notation of the actual release. We should not depart from this.

You can say the same about capitalisation and other areas where MB has always tided up the titles in a consistent way.

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We should always be tidying up messy tags, stuff from digital stores that solely exist for algorithmic purposes, etc. How does this go against MB being the ultimate source of music information? In fact, I believe this is even more in line with that principle. This database has such vast features that we should always be utilizing to the best of our ability. It actually looks lazier, to me, to just copy things verbatim from digital music stores for the sake of replicating the digital store’s presentation. Something like “(live version)” on every single track is not artist intent, because it’s just a generic tag put on all tracks by the digital service.

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Taken literally, this would have undesirable results: e.g. on this release it says that about half of the live tracks should have the ETI removed, but the other half not (because they also appear on the studio part). Hopefully nobody would actually make that mistake, but still. IvanDobsky’s more general phrasing sounds good to me: the use of the word “repeated” also suggests that the guideline isn’t intended to apply to releases with a single track, which is probably also what we want.

I am not sure why you think this: they certainly can. They might change them back if the artist noticed, cared, and asked them to, but even that isn’t completely clear to me. Very often, the track titles on different streaming services don’t even agree with each other (e.g. because Spotify has a different ETI style to Deezer and so on).

For me, this is not obvious, and I would appreciate clearer guidance. Even though I would also be in favour of removing this kind of duplicated ETI, it wasn’t obvious to me that the community agreed, and so I haven’t been removing it (and have left it in when importing new releases with Harmony etc.)

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What is the benefit of having “remove ETIs if all have the same ETI?” If it is just to make things look nicer, I feel it is useless. Instead, we should focus on the disadvantage of losing accuracy.

Also, if we were to say “if a different ETI is included, leave that ETI”, there would be both tracks with ETIs and tracks without ETIs, which would not be consistent.

I think that deciding to remove/not remove ETIs according to tracklists would create differences in perception among editors and would not be thorough. Therefore, we feel that it would be better to say "leave ETIs uniformly, regardless of the contents of the track listings.

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Maybe we should wait until the alternative tracklists feature is out to make it into an official guideline saying “Remove useless ETI from the main tracklist, but you are free to have a secondary tracklist ‘as printed on Spotify’, etc.”. That way, people who really want that can still have it.

In the meantime, I’d expect people to still vote as they think is best (I’d personally always vote to remove cruft)

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The “live” ETI and similar on streaming services are not artist intent but caused by naming requirements of the platforms. Hence there can also be differences for the same release on multiple platforms.

See for example section 3, specifically section 3.15, of Apple Music Style Guide

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