Thanks for the pointer, I have now posted the request as: Works should allow external links to commercial “Get the Work”
I really like this, actually. Any reason why this shouldn’t be allowed, anyone? @rob? (I’d possibly name it “purchase the score at” or something, although I guess sometimes we might want to link to free scores from sites not in the whitelist).
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If we have purchase URLs for Works, then I think they should mirror those available for Release, for the same reason.
Note that (unlike releases) you can’t buy works, because they are just ideas. This is not about the work itself, but some description of it.
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I would argue that a work has to be written down, and hence is available as a score. We already have the option to add an external URL to a score, as long as it is on a whitelisted free website. I’m only suggesting we extend this to have an option to point the URL to a commercially available score (hardcopy or download).
Not really true - there’s a lot of pop songs that I’m pretty sure don’t have scores for sale (and even when they do, I suspect most covers of the works are done without a score). That doesn’t mean in any way that we shouldn’t link to scores, but it does make sense, semantically, to specify that it’s a link to get the score rather than to get the work 
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Indeed, it often happens that artists publish (free) score for their own works on their official website. Would that require a third “self-published score” relationship?
I think all the whitelisted scores are free, but they could appear elsewhere, in additional to commercially available scores for hardcopy purchase and download.
That would, theoretically, use the currently available “has lyrics available at” relationship - the problem with that is that we can’t really whitelist every single artist website with their own scores. 
It has been brought up plenty of times before, but there’s not really a good way to handle this (yet).
Actually, I’ve always been a bit confused by score whitelisting. Sure, lyrics sites are a very tricky case because it’s hard to know if a site is legit or not. But scores seem to me much more similar to “get the music” rels, where we don’t have a whitelist for places to purchase music from in case some of them selling releases illegally, and we just trust our users to be reasonable.
We already link releases to websites that sell CDs or digital downloads without whitelisting, whether it be Amazon or the artist’s own website. Both are legitimate, or we give the benefit of the doubt.
A score is just another medium, and I don’t see why it should be treated differently from a release? Surely we must assume good faith?
I’m definitely going to add this. I do have one big doubt though: what to do with the current, whitelisted score relationship. Should it stay? Should it just be un-whitelisted and turned into this relationship. with the whitelist turning into simply autoselect? I’m leaning towards the second, but happy to hear opinions.
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I think the other one should stay. As I understand it, this one is for purchasing/mail ordering the sheet music, while the current relationship is for getting the sheet music for free.
I would make “Get the Work” to closely follow “Get the Music”, so that we have:
Get the Music Get the Work
--Purchase for mail order --Purchase for mail order
--Purchase for download --Purchase for download
--Download for free --Download for free (old whitelist)
--Stream for free
This provides consistency, and includes information for people who are wondering what has happened to the “whitelist”. I don’t think there is an equivalent to “Streaming” scores.
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Does the “Get the Music” option include links to bootleg music and dodgy downloads, and what is the policy? I don’t think we should be including anything that infringes copyright, and I assume there are blacklist of websites that do.
Fair enough, but what happens with, say, free score downloads from the artist? Should the free score rel move away from the whitelist and use just autoselect?
I think the free score downloads should just be renamed “-Download for free (old whitelist)”, whether from the artist directly, or from some other source, and the idea of a whitelist should be scrapped since we do no have an equivalent for “Get the Music”.
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This has been added (see the URL-Work relationship list).
The whitelist needs to be disabled still, I’ve added an MBS ticket for that.
The link phrases are kinda unwieldy: “mail-order purchase page for the score of” / “download purchase page for the score of” / “free download page for the score of”. I’d like suggestions for shorter options that still make clear the type and purchase and that it’s a score, if possible.
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That’s great, and I see that it is already available in MusicBrainz. I think the wording is fine. Much appreciated.