It turns out they’re all on MB, but none of them are finished or have any details. My gut reaction is that they should be removed/withdrawn. Interested in arguments for/against. (This might feel like a duplicate thread, which is fine, I could not find one with any resolution, but in any case I’d argue this is even less compelling a case than someone’s playlist which seems to have been discussed a fair amount.)
Digital bootlegs are fine according to guidelines if they’re distributed to other people. If you can download it on a blog, the bold part isn’t relevant.
While we welcome bootlegs, we discourage adding home-made compilations or mixtapes. These kinds of releases are not widely available and any information about them is typically only useful to the individual who created them. Releases such as these are usually removed from our database.
Yes this is basically what I meant (though I agree with other members that bootlegs have dubious archival value too). Though it can be downloaded, it’s not easy to find, as perhaps evidenced by the fact that the files are violating copyright and have nevertheless been hanging out there for a cool 12 years. It’s also stated homemade as can be.
So I guess I’m saying I don’t agree that someone throwing some stuff onto a blog post constitutes any kind of release? Or maybe the guidelines need to better define “widely” or “available”.
100% this also, as if figuring out what is what and where it came from weren’t hard enough, just garbage
Also sorry, I will keep returning to this point until someone else addresses it, a bootleg “company” knows it’s doing illegal, let’s grant the home/blog user the benefit of the doubt and say they don’t… what is the value in propagating hapless “sharing”?
According to guidelines, data being bad enough that one could not reasonable identify the release is grounds for deletion, but bootleg status is not. You said that “none of them are finished” in your opening post, if that’s the case (I’m reading it as if the releases are missing tracks or are broken in another way), they can be removed (which allows another editor to potentially re-add these properly at a later date).
The second is a release where the information is so lacking that it just can’t be matched to a real-world release and improved. For example, a classical music release where the only information available is track titles can be almost impossible to match to an actual release in order to find more data about its performers, label and whatnot. This should always be a last resort option! Before you enter an edit to remove the release, you should at least check the edit notes in case any more information is available there (sometimes links or even a barcode might have been added to an edit note but not to the release itself). If the editor who added the release is still active, you should also contact them by leaving an edit note on the release add edit and asking whether they can provide more information. Only if there’s really nothing to be found and the original editor seems unlikely to respond (or hasn’t responded in a reasonable amount of time) should you actually enter a removal edit.
Yes sorry, that was not a clear statement at all. “Finished” here means “I can prove where I got it, I can prove what it is, I can prove that it’s correct to the limit of possibility, and those things together explain why this is here and useful.” Which is not MB’s standard for data, but is my own.
The “set” of “releases” in question were all just flung up here as titles with tracklists. I invite you to look, that is not an exaggeration.
I can understand a permissive policy, but as @jesus2099 points out in a different way, I have a much harder time understanding why garbage in is not simply garbage in, and worthy of dismissal on those grounds alone, especially when proven to be a homemade mishmash “validated” by appearing on an obscure blog post. Adding a release here should not be a permit to create work for people who know how to add releases? (Yes, I understand beginners need to begin, and realize this is an age-old useful-forum debate, having participated in them for a very, very long time now.)
The exact same argument can go for official/legal various artists compilations, especially for public domain oldies compilations which are uploaded en-masse to streaming.
Some unofficial/illegal various artists compilations like Pebbles, Killed by Death etc. are of immense interest to niche music fans. Not to mention all the artist-specific ones, Dylan, Beatles etc. have hundreds of bootleg compilations here.
Is your problem really that this is unauthorized (and that this would be fine, if it was a compilation of public domain 78 rpm recordings), or that it’s just poorly entered data in the first place? I’ve spent by far more time cleaning up official compilations than a few bootleg ones, and in the age of mass-produced streaming compilations, the issue of VA compilations is even worse.
Go to this Deezer page for a Dutch Hawaiian music band Kilima Hawaiians, scroll down until you get to the various artist compilations to see just how many mass produced 30s compilations there are on streaming platforms. These ones are completely legal and some of them (though a very small percentage!) are even entered in MB (Golden Bridge Records is just one label doing this practice).
Bootleg compilations are more thought out and curated than the vast majority of legal streaming compilations, and I don’t see them as a problem. If this was entered with more care (durations, release info, reusing existing recordings etc.) what’s the harm?
I take your broader point and would consider the “are bootlegs useful” discussion ultimately off-topic (though very interesting to me, big difference between, say, fan-driven and copyright-dodging). I too spend a lot of time hunting down official releases poorly entered, especially compilations (though I avoid digital like the plague, speaking of things that don’t belong), and it is certainly the #2 activity behind editing whatever it is I’m editing at the time.
My point here is in the original post, but it fleshes out as we discuss: the dude says clearly on his blog (in so many words, not quoting) “here’s a mix I made for friends, enjoy!”, not “I am a passionate defender of the illegal distribution of unattributed Christmas standards and the world must have this.”
I won’t be able to get more succinct than this: it’s not authorized, true, and the data quality here is garbage, sure, but the thing itself simply was not “released”, it was merely uploaded, and the garbage data should have been rejected accordingly. My objection is at MB “respecting” the point of origin, which is not any kind of issuer, legal or no. It’s a dude on the ~2011 equivalent of napster with a webpage.