Fringe Releases and the Flexibility of What MBz Tracks

MusicBrainz
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(I’ve left this under General MusicBrainz for the moment, but it could go into Style)

About a year or so ago I created a folksonomy tag called fringe releases:
https://musicbrainz.org/tag/fringe%20releases/release

I’d apply this tag to any release entry I’d find that does not conform to the norm.

The norm being what someone would consider a normal medium for music to be delivered (for example a CD, a vinyl record, a shellac, an audio cassette, a digital audio file etc.).

However we being music nerds know that there are so many different ways music and music content can be delivered to us. I call these methods fringe releases because they sit on the very edges (fringe) of what the MusicBrainz community may accept as a suitable release medium.

Please do not take this as a call to arms to go out there and start adding the weirdest crap you can find for the sake of it, we have so much traditional media to still add!

I’ve started this thread for people to discuss these weird fringe releases, maybe give some context or structure to how to store them in the database that is respectful and doesn’t deter from storing the more traditional mediums that the average site user is likely looking for.

I’ll get the ball rolling with what I’ve found so far, some of these I have a hand in adding.

Note: If there are any mediums that you think need a seperate discussion, then please create and just link it back here. I don’t want this to divulge into an argument about the historical relevancy of HitClips.

DVD Movies with Music Video Tracks
You’ll see a few entries under that tag are for DVD movies. Of course MBz doesn’t track movie content, that would likely be something built to compete with the likes of IMDb or Bluray.com; but we do track music videos. One way of getting music videos is to buy DVD movies that have special features that include them. I thought it’d be cool to keep track of which physical DVD (or Blu-ray, or VHS etc.) releases have these music videos. Many of these music videos when included on these DVD’s also include useful metadata like the video director or the producer.

Singing Fish
@UltimateRiff spent a period of brief madness adding a few of the Big Mouth Billy Bass singing fish. Maybe something you saw in a big-box department store about 10 years ago that comprised of a plastic river fish (usually a bass) filled with a few small motors that would move, shake and lip-sync along to various popular tracks.

Certainly an interesting way of enjoying music, not sure it’s one for the audiophiles out there!

Singing/Musical Toothbrushes

Sometime in the late 2000’s some bright spark worked out that due to the interconnectivity of the human ears, nose and throat that it was possible to play music through the instrument that many put inside their mouth at least once a day, a toothbrush that is.

There’s a few trademarks for these the most popular being Tooth Tunes, but there are a few Brite Beatz entries on here as well.

8/16-bit Video Game Cartridges
I’ve tagged these for the moment, I’m still not sure if the jury is out if we want to record these.

Video games have made sounds since their inception, and for the 8-bit and 16-bit eras (and probably into the 32-bit, and 64-bit) we started to see composed music be achieved. Sometimes this was genuine sampled audio being played back (in the same way you might have a PCM WAV file on a PC CD-ROM) but most of the time it was a series of instructions to make that consoles dedicated soundchip make particular noises in a set sequence.

Considering we dont currently allow MIDI entries, it is a point of confusion as to if these “cartridge” entries are even allowed - even as a fringe release.

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As a quick response to this, please use my tag to tag other weird and wonderful release mediums you find in the database.

Some that I can think of that I’d consider to be “fringe” would be:

  • Hitclips
  • McDonalds Happy Meal toys that played short-snippets of pop-songs much like hitclips
  • Greeting cards that play music when opened
  • Clothing that play music when buttons are pressed
  • Pre-loaded MP3 players that contain audiobooks, or other types of audio (Techmoan has covered a few of these)
  • Childrens books that play music from within a device built into the book (not a seperate CD or tape)
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for what it’s worth, @teethfairy and @aerozol did a ton of work on FishBrainz too~ that said, I’m glad to be “The FishBrainz Guy™”~

back on topic, I’ve got a similar collection (though not exactly the same, as it does include some regular formats with interesting properties)

I’ll try not to, lol~

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Seeing your head cleaner entry, reminds me I ended up being that guy on Discogs who kept adding and finding lens cleaners and putting them into a list.

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nice~ I’ve actually wanted to find our old one and add it, but I can’t take credit for the head cleaner, as that’s all @aerozol’s doing~ lol

that said, I did add The Ultimate Soundtracker, which is software for making music, but one of the disks is full of samples which were co-opted by the tracker music community and widely used therein, which is why I added that software

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There is a whole thread on the Billy the Fish and other items. Billy the Fish appeared in series like The Sopranos and can be argued to be an early “meme” before the term existed.

I can see why someone want to add items like this as researchers want to know who actually performed the song. (It was also quite fun tracking down the history)

I don’t see the point in tagging stuff like this. It is just an opinion tag. “Fringe” is a very vague term. If you are putting game audio in there, you might as well add all the Nyan cats and other memes.

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(Bolding added by me.) I couldn’t find anything stating this when I searched the style guidelines and the forums. If it’s the policy, it should be added to the documentation somewhere (apologies if I missed it).

I don’t know if I have a clear opinion about it: a MIDI file isn’t actually a recording (it’ll sound different depending on the patch set that’s used when playing it), but it also feels unfortunate to completely exclude these due to the format. I know they can still be added as works (see e.g. Windows Media Sample Songs - MusicBrainz, which have recordings due to cover versions and YouTube uploads), but a MIDI file feels more concrete than a work to me.

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MIDI files were also touched on in a recent discussion of piano rolls with which they share some similarities.

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another type of fringe release I just remembered is sample packs, collections of samples made for using in your own tracks. many of these are newer sample packs distributed digitally, but I’d imagine there’s many examples from before the era of digital media on CD, cassette, and vinyl.

a related area of the database is sound effects, which could probably be used the same way (depending on licensing, of course) (I also didn’t realize that’s an actual MusicBrainz genre…)

(obligatory mention of Mr Farts, who I hear is one of your faves… lol)

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