Legitimacy of Youtube as a source for releases

My standard for Youtube videos is to add a standalone recording, but that’s mostly because I don’t expect most artists to consider their stuff uploaded to Youtube as something that should appear as a single in their discography. That said, I’d love to have a “Videos” tab on artist pages where you can see their, er, “videography”.

There might very well be some cases though where an artist does consider a Youtube only release a release. For example, I added the first 5 tracks of this as a release, because the titles and “cover art” are made in such a way that it’s clear the artist intended it to be a mixtape of sorts. As far as I can tell, the artist’s Youtube channel is the only place this is available from (directly from the artist, at least).

In the case of this track you linked, given the “semantics” of that video, so to say, it sounds reasonable to me to keep it as a release (although it should be credited to Zayd & Corrigan, not just Zayd, as per the cover).

As an aside: this isn’t really a video other than in the most technical meaning, it’s a static image with audio, so I wouldn’t link it with “stream video for free” but just “stream for free”. To me at least, “stream video for free” suggests there’s something to watch at that link’s destination :slight_smile:

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