How to treat Spotify links to withdrawn releases?

Due to Spotify dealing differently with withdrawn releases, lately I’ve been unchecking the ‘ended’ checkbox on Spotify links (Release-URL relationships) for said releases. On a second thought however, I’d like to know others’ opinion.

Editors on digital media should have noticed by now that unlike other online music platforms (Apple Music, et. al.) who completely purge releases from their services as soon as they are withdrawn, Spotify has its own way of dealing with them. They are merely hidden from searches, but still accessible if you have the link and the tracks get substituted with recordings available on other releases (if available).

I get why editors mark those links as ended since MB currently allows only one type for the corresponding Release-URL relationships, namely “free streaming”. I do that too for other services since those links are pretty much useless if the release got withdrawn. However, this comes at the cost of graying out those links and rendering them unclickable, even the Spotify ones. Although they don’t serve their initial purpose anymore, I think they can still be a useful reference for the existence of those releases. It shouldn’t be any different from links to other music databases (Discogs, Jaxsta, etc.) that we keep adding on release pages.

Perhaps there’s a missing functionality different from the ‘ended’ checkbox that should deal with such cases, although I’m aware that it might be additional workload to the devs (maybe someone has already created a ticket that I’m not aware of).

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I still mark them ended. But yes, it’s annoying sometimes I’ll mark them ended and then want to grab the image from Spotify and greying them out makes you have to uncheck the box. You have a valid point if you look at it from the perspective of Discogs, etc. We don’t grey those out when the release is no longer available. It is actually still a good link. It’s just that the release it is attached to isn’t really available anymore there. Usually they’ll just let you stream it because it’s replacement is there and it’s forwarding the recording to that.

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I’ve also wondered about this. Sometimes withdrawn releases on spotify will even still be able to be streamed, because they use “recordings” from another release. Take for example Calling Out by Dyro, this release is hidden, atisket shows “No countries could be matched”, but the link still works, and the song is still there, available to stream.
This is because the track used in that release is the same as the one in this other version with two tracks.

I marked the relationship as ended because it made sense to me at the time.
I think that if the release is no longer “available”, then it’s valid for the link to be marked as ended, but I also think that if the track is still able to be streamed, then it makes sense to add the track link to the MB recording, but I know that this is rarely done, and particularly annoying to do with larger releases :laughing:

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On another note, I actually think that spotify not completely removing releases is a great thing for preservation of data! I’ve been able to add details from withdrawn releases thanks to the links not completely 404’ing, with the help of tools like atisket and harmony.
It’s very annoying to try and update a release that only has an itunes relationship, only to be greeted with a 404 page.
Deezer sometimes shows a 404 page, and sometimes it’ll automatically redirect to another release, even if it’s a completely different release (barcode, tracklist, etc.) which is tricky if you’re not paying attention.

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Oh, this is really good information!

So it’s best not to assume that something isn’t withdrawn, just because tracks are showing up (e.g. showing up again, after a break) - a bit confusing from MB’s side, but actually pretty clever on Spotify’s part.

Regarding setting links to ended, I would still set those links to ended, from a database perspective. I think this is a UI issue, where editors/researchers can’t click the link. It’s a bit lazy (but also most likely to happen…) but perhaps a userscript that renders these clickable would be useful?

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This seems to me like Release is “withdrawn”, but this shop is trying to keep alive some kind of links to a related track. Often this is not actually the same track - sometimes swapping album and singles with the same name - it is just the shop trying to keep a link alive.

The Release is withdrawn, but associated tracks are kept linked.

If the spotify links to something then keeping it seems logical

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I think it’s withdrawn. But they don’t remove links on Spotify. It’s the best thing about them. You can still get info and artwork! Even though the release is technically no longer available. So, I’m wondering now if we shouldn’t mark the links ended, but just change the status to withdrawn. As @DenizC pointed out on his edit. We don’t end Discogs links that are still valid, so why are we ending these? I always did because the release wasn’t technically available. But now that we can mark a release as withdrawn (after all it will not show up in a serch on Spotify) maybe we should do that and keep the link valid.

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Because these links are for something specific, like “stream at”. External services pulling this data from MusicBrainz expect to get a link for a certain purpose, and this breaks that.

I would also like to click on these, btw, I have often had to click through to a old Spotify URL, but my use-case as an editor is different to what the database is trying to store/deliver.

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Ahh. Good point. Then maybe an archive link option?

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I always mark the links as ended. It’s misleading to tell users they can stream the release on Spotify when what they’re actually streaming is some Frankenstein release cobbled together from whatever tracks Spotify has available and thinks sound close enough. Which is fine if the tracks are matched correctly, but can range from obviously wrong to not-so-obviously wrong.

Also, the links are still clickable if you click on the “[info]” link.

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