Kanye West & The Life of Pablo’s multiple mixes

For those who don’t know, Kanye West released his album The Life of Pablo on the streaming service Tidal in February (currently in MB). Starting in March, he began releasing new mixes/updates, which will seem to continue until… well, nobody really knows if/when a “final mix” will be released.

At least one of the updated mixes has been released as a single (just added this myself), while other versions of various mixes are floating around Kanye’s Soundcloud.

This poses an interesting challenge - assuming several mixes are released before the “final mix”, should each be added as a new, separate release, with new, separate recordings? What I did when adding the “Famous” single was create a new recording with the disambiguation “second mix w/ altered lyric”, as that’s a change that had been widely reported/confirmed, and added disambiguation to the original mix. Unfortunately, I don’t have Tidal to verify if every track has been changed. Someone added a new release based on an updated mix released this month, but they just linked all the recordings to the first mix :cry:

What are your thoughts on best practices for albums released mid-process? It’s a fascinating use of the streaming medium, and I imagine we’ll see more of these from Kanye at the very least.

EDIT: Fixed hyperlinks :smile:

Well, new mixes are definitely new recordings, that much we know. So what I’d probably do would be to split anything that is likely to be a new mix a new recording at first (with an appropriate disambiguation) and then they can be merged back if a specific track turns out to be unchanged.

I would definitely add a new release with new recordings.

MusicBrainz is actually well suited to deal with things like this because of our Release Group structure (phew) and if you correctly annotate (and disambiguate if necessary/useful) and date releases it shouldn’t cause too much clutter for anyone!

2 Likes