How do I search for Soundtracks from motion pictures?

MusicBrainz Picard
1

Try searching for this:
Midnight Cowboy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
From Artist, Event, Recording, Release. Sometimes I’m lucky and what I search for is in another field in the results, but sometimes, like now, it just doesn’t show up. At least not on the first page. So how do I search fore it? The official title of the album is what I search for. I’m confused.

2

Various releases of the soundtrack show up when I search for Midnight Cowboy, but including Original Motion Picture Soundtrack seems to throw it off since that’s not present in the name of the release group or any of the releases.

I created edits to fix the data in MB:

I don’t know anything about how MB search and Lucene work, but it feels like the Midnight Cowboy part of your search phrase ought to be weighted much more highly than Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.

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3

If you just want to search soundtracks, you can probably get better results by going to Search - MusicBrainz, selecting “Release group” and “Indexed search with advanced query syntax”, and then searching for something like "Midnight Cowboy" secondarytype:Soundtrack.

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4

Searching with fewer words likely to get the better match. There were a few old debates as to whether (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) was part of the title, and then it was usually added with a colon as a subtitle.

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5

I agree - I am not sure that Original Motion Picture Score is part of the main title at all. I think it is extra information, and the style guidelines are clear about how “Extra title information” should be handled:

Additional information on a release or track name that is not part of its main title, but intended to distinguish it from different releases or tracks with the same main title (such as version/remix names or live recording info), should be entered in parentheses after the main title.

There are, however, a lot of alternative releases which have nothing to do with the OMPS but have the same name, so I think that adding this extra information does make sense.

So whilst I appreciate the intent with these edits, I think @derat needs to cancel these and re-enter them in the correct format.

P.S. When you submit revised edits, please add Discogs links at the release level to matching releases, and copy across cover art from Discogs.

6

Have you read the soundtrack guidelines at https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases/Soundtrack#Release that I linked to in the edits?

Consider text such as “Original Motion Picture Score” or “Music from the Motion Picture” as release subtitles.

These releases are similar to the example given there (https://musicbrainz.org/release/a00b843f-0e21-45a1-ab1f-e6089e740fbd), and as far as I’m aware, it’s widely accepted that text like “Original Motion Picture Score” should be included as a release subtitle when it appears on a front cover or spine.

1 Like
7

On reflection I agree about the subtitle and that Soundtrack guidelines should take priority.