How to deal with waterfall releases? [STYLE-2751]

[Kiirabu197]

i guess the solution for now is making them singles and adding a “single from” relation. i was wondering though… is there anything that speaks against having them be promotional releases in the album RG?

the “Promotion” status can indicate “a release intended to promote an upcoming official release”, which waterfall releases clearly fall into. or do we not use that because waterfall releases are still “Official” first and foremost?

Status - Style / Release - MusicBrainz

[afrocat]

@Kiirabu197

is there anything that speaks against having them be promotional releases in the album RG?

well, singles don’t go in the album’s release group, they’re singles

@Kiirabu197

the “Promotion” status can indicate “a release intended to promote an upcoming official release”, which waterfall releases clearly fall into.

All singles from an album would fall into that description, waterfall or not
The promotion status is used for releases that are not official, the examples given in the style guideline are pretty clear: a release with “not for sale” printed on the CD, included with a newspaper, or included with a magazine
There’s also some released specifically for DJs and some sent to radios - see relevant thread: Is radio airplay a release?
Also releases like this one released in advance of the official release for bandcamp subscribers (see edit #118543344)
And patreon-exclusive releases like this one

[afrocat]

Since we have now revived this thread, I’ll give my opinion as well :)
Waterfall singles, no matter how long, should be treated just like regular singles. Maybe we could include an annotation that clarifies the release is a waterfall single and not an EP, in cases where streaming sites auto-set the release type to something other than single.

@reosarevok

For what it’s worth, my suggestion of a potential new relationship would be a release-to-release rel to link waterfall singles together, rather than a RG-to-RG one (since as we have seen, the same single could have two releases in the same RG, one waterfall and one single-track). The idea would just be to have a way to show “Z includes Y which includes X which includes…”

Agreed 100%, this whole thing seems like the perfect use case for a MB relationship.

I haven’t come across many cases where a waterfall single keeps growing until the artist considers it an album, but in those cases we should either confirm artist intent, or put it up to community consensus (yet another thing that would benefit from having more editors that vote…)

[JÃ_germaestro]

@afrocat

Agreed 100%, this whole thing seems like the perfect use case for a MB relationship.

I have done this in the past with a chain of “X includes Y” relationships at the RG level, and then “Single/EP is included in” relationships linking all the singles to the final album.

“X includes Y” does seem intended more for compilations and box sets so perhaps a new relationship altogether would be preferable. One that lets you group all of them together and specify an order (like a series) might be nice.