ListenBrainz album counts not matching sum of individual track plays

Browsing my lovely Year in Music 2023 page, I discovered that one can view the listens associated with albums listed in MB. To my delight, I found that this is not just possible for my top albums, but can be performed for any release group in the database by simply substituting the release group ID. As a stress test, I chose the Listenbrainz page of the obscure sin-of-youth Turn Up the Bass, Volume 1 and that actually worked!

The page did make me wonder how the listen count for any release group is established. The album count is 27 plays from 14 listeners, at the time of this writing. Naively, I would expect those to be the sum of the plays of the individual tracks, but those sum to 1 + 355 + 129 = 485. So whence the discrepancy? Enquiring minds want to know.

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Relevant JIRA ticket here

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