I’ve found these two weird Wage War singles on Spotify using this method:
They’re named after the album, but are just singles released before it.
To clarify, they’re not named after any track named ‘Pressure’, there’s no title track on the album. These just seem like mislabeled waterfall releases (including the album cover art instead of the dedicated single art)
Which release group should these be added to?
- A new “Pressure” single release group
- The Pressure album release group
- The release group for the first track in the singles (Who I Am and Prison) (Makes the most sense to me)
I’ve only spent a few minutes researching this, but these appear not to be singles but promotional “preview” “prerelease” “pre-order” “pre-whatever” versions of the released album… but uploaded to Spotify as a new album each time, rather than editing/updating an existing album.
These are distinct album’s in Spotify’s database, so I would add them. Probably as “Withdrawn” and then URLs to Spotify marked with the dates 2019-07-09 to 2019-07-30 for the two track “00888072117662” and the dates 2019-07-30 to 2019-08-30 for “00888072117679” because the full album was released on 2019-08-30 as “00888072105829”
Possibly as “Promotional” too, I guess, maybe?
This album on Apple Music follows a similar timeline, however each update modified the current album, rather than creating a new album each time.
The release dates of each track from Apple Music are like this:
“2019-07-08T07:00:00Z”, 1, “Who I Am”
“2019-08-01T07:00:00Z”, 2, “Prison”
“2019-08-30T12:00:00Z”, 3, “Grave”
“2019-08-30T12:00:00Z”, 4, “Ghost”
“2019-08-01T07:00:00Z”, 5, “Me Against Myself”
“2019-08-30T12:00:00Z”, 6, “Hurt”
“2019-07-08T07:00:00Z”, 7, “Low”
“2019-08-30T12:00:00Z”, 8, “The Line”
“2019-08-30T12:00:00Z”, 9, “Fury”
“2019-08-30T12:00:00Z”, 10, “Forget My Name”
“2019-08-30T12:00:00Z”, 11, “Take The Fight”
“2019-08-30T12:00:00Z”, 12, “Will We Ever Learn”
The two track and four track promotional versions of the album got “eaten” by the final release, but on Spotify they didn’t get eaten.
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This reminds me… I’ve been manually… forensically, reconstructing the release timeline of some very confusing “Digital Media” releases across several online music stores. Music labels can upload whatever they want, whenever they want, naming/identifying the stuff as whatever they want, and even editing it multiple different times. Some online Music Stores are really good about actually maintaining POSIX filesystem time semantics, other like Spotify really suck at it.
Like, two individual two track singles uploaded to Beatport in 2005, and then a one track version uploaded to the iTunes Store in 2006. And then in 2007 the iTunes release has five more tracks uploaded/added to it. Then in 2010, the record label gets a new distributor, who uploads a four track version to Beatport (a second time) in 2010, and Deezer and Spotify in 2010, and WiMP in 2010 which became Tidal in 2014… and all of these use the exact same EAN/UPC and release date
Anyway, collecting this metadata is rather tedious to do by hand and I’ve been considering writing a tool to automate this. It’s not much different than what Harmony does to collect metadata for importing releases to MusicBrainz… in fact… it should be very easy to modify Harmony to just display the Time and Date metadata which it is already currently collecting now and then discarding.
This could also help address the confusing problem in MusicBrainz of how to document a Digital Media release that claims to have been released in 1971 before the invention of the Internet.
MusicBrainz currently supports multiple release events in localized geopolitical areas on Earth… like “North Korea” and “Antarctica” for example, we could just add a release event type for “Creation Date”, “Modification Date”, and “Release Date” or “Published Date”, etc. (The “Modification Date” would probably be used on a relationship connecting two (or more) separately stored versions of a release, pointing forwards and backwards between the two versions of the same album at two points in time.)
Basically… instead of events (like release to retail stores) in physical space, we also need events in time… for logical identifier changes/transformations… a revision history… a git repository for releases.
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Still feels weird though, they’re singles so shouldn’t they be seperate? And marking them as Promo doesn’t make sense, and doesn’t really line up with the style guidelines. I think putting them in the release group of the first track makes the most sense to me. They’re not a pre-release album, since Spotify has their own pre-release system that these singles clearly didn’t use.
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