"Fake leak" release: same release group or different?

What’s the right way to categorize the “fake leak” release of Daft Punk’s “Discovery” at https://musicbrainz.org/release/7c3157ba-4f6f-4162-a6ec-93842c143877? As of a few days ago, it lives in the real album’s release group, and its 2000 release date messes up originaldate for official releases (see MBS-6559).

From the editing history, it sounds like it was imported from https://www.discogs.com/release/22896029-Daft-Punk-Discovery, but that’s describing a 2022 Argentinian reissue at this point. I suspect the original source was https://archive.org/details/2000-discovery-beta-version, which claims that the release is from 2000, but it wasn’t uploaded to IA until 2022, so who knows when it first appeared (the YT video below claims that the “leak” was distributed after the 2001 official release).

There are various pages/videos with more discussion of the “leak”:

My inclination is to just move it back to its own release group since it doesn’t pass the “equivalent to other releases” test for me, but I’m curious about what other editors think.

1 Like

If the date is debated - then maybe remove the date and add notes in the annotation?

Or is this more of a “demo” version? how similar are the tracks? Could bump it into the demo category?

From some comments in the above Reddit thread:

Some tracks are the real deal, but in low quality. Some tracks are by different artists and some are fan edits. But it was definitely not the real deal.

Pretty much this was spread around on Limewire and Napster in 2002 as being a demo or beta (As it was known as later on) and pretty much contained looped versions of some of the released tracks on Discovery, the single version of One More Time and a bunch of other songs which you can pretty much tell are faked, the supposed Superheroes demo contains a sample of The Gibson Brothers - CUBA, and if i remember, one of the tracks was a remix of one of the Motorbass remixes of Around The World

https://rateyourmusic.com/music-review/geocities/various-artists/discovery-beta-version/146538085 goes into more detail about individual tracks.

I’m not convinced that this should even appear as a Daft Punk release in MB, but I’m also not sure where it should go otherwise – [unknown] or Various Artists seem like valid options, but I figure someone will just re-add it under the Daft Punk artist in the future if I do that.

I’ll probably just delete the 2000 release date and improve the annotation for now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’d say from those details it heads into “compilation” land… though not sure if I’d change it to Various Artists as it was released under the Daft Punk name - even if totally fake. So I’d keep it around Daft Punk in some way. Even if to just avoid it being readded.

Do the AcoustIDs help pick out those other tracks? Or just too low quality?

Its worth getting some of these history notes into the annotation. Especially as sites where the real history is will disappear with time.

1 Like

Comparing the files, I’d say that only One More Time seems close enough to share the official recording. I’ve created new recordings with disambiguations for all the other tracks that have names in common with tracks from the official album. (I think that some editors may be getting a bit carried away with recording merges – some of the track durations differed by multiple minutes from the existing recordings.)

After comparing this track-by-track, I’m pretty convinced that it doesn’t belong in the “real” release group. I’ve moved it to Release group “Discovery (Beta Version)” by Daft Punk - MusicBrainz and added an annotation there as well. Since the only release in the RG is a bootleg, it at least won’t be listed by default on the artist page.

Definitely more effort than I usually expend on junk added from Napster. :-/

3 Likes