Looking for help cleaning up the Jamendo "label"

@ anyone coming here from my edit notes: I have created a release series which replaces the pseudo label. this should be used from now on:


Original post:

Hello there,

so I recently added the albums from LukHash to my collection and I noticed that some of his earlier releases on Musicbrainz have Jamendo listed as the label. from what I can see however at least for these cases it merely acts as a digital distrubition platform. So why is Jamendo and the id number listed as a label and catalogue number? It seems arbitrary to me. Especially considering that these releases also feature other platform links as well where there is no mentioning of Jamendo being the music label. In fact these releases seem to be self-published aka [no label].

I guess, why not add spotify or deezer as labels and add their id numbers as catnos as well?

label in question:

release in question:

already edited by me:

Can someone share some light into this situation? Sorry for maybe sounding a little harsh but this really confuses me.

Discogs site about Jamendo states that this is in fact not a label at all.
https://www.discogs.com/label/814915-Jamendocom

I agree, it probably should be treated in the same way like DistroKid is DistroKid - Relationships - MusicBrainz

This is likely just another example of something historical that is being continued by other editors who may not be fully aware - I personally wouldn’t have any problem with you moving ahead to resolve but it is a lot of work to undertake.

I’ll wait for others to chime in but if the general concensous is positive about making this change I will help you to adjust 40 pages worth of releases.

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You may want to ask @outsidecontext for their thoughts. They started writing that “how to” annotation on the label. Way back in 2007…

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I’ve pmed @outsidecontext about it. I don’t think I have the capacity to do that much manual edits. My first naive idea was to simply merge this “label” with the [no label]. Would this cause harm or destroy valuable information for other users?

What @sound.and.vision suggested is probably the correct way. On second sight - it’s a different situation? I don’t know if Jamendo should really be considered as the “distributor” of these releases. to me it looks like it’s just one additional digital platform where these albums are available.

I guess it depends if we think that the Jamendo album ID is useful data to track, there’s probably no harm in moving it to a URL relationship

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That has been a very long time ago, I really don’t remember all the details. But as far as I remember there was generally some discussion on how to handle digital distributors and net labels at the time, and Jamendo was handled similar to CDBaby and Magnatune (with the latter probably being the only one that actually should qualify as a label).

I found some later, but inconclusive discussion, from the mb-style mailing list, where this topic was brought up as part of a similar discussion about handling Bandcamp as a label: Re: [mb-style] Bandcamp label?

I think from today’s perspective Jamendo is clearly not a release label.

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thanks for the input. so how should we go forward? for my own personal use I’m gonna remove the label and catno from releases I’m interested in.

for the entire label entry on MB however I think of two options.

  1. merge with [no label] - this wouldn’t remove the catalogue numbers though
  2. delete label - I thinks this is okay for the most part but I noticed that some releases under this “label” don’t have any Jamendo-URL listed. so there would be some information loss.

regarding option 2 - maybe we can filter out these releases and add the missing URLs manually before deletion? wouldn’t know how to though with the search options.

You can’t delete a label directly

In order for a label to be autoremoved, it needs to be used on no releases. If the releases should themselves be removed, see the release section above; if not, then edit the releases and fix them to use the right label (or just merge the label if it is a duplicate). Additionally, it needs to have no relationships to other entities; you’ll need to enter removal edits for any relationships (including URLs).

A merge on the other hand has more consequences. It will not only transfer the releases but also the tags, ratings, reviews, aliases, relationships, subscribers [1] and collections.


  1. will actually be dropped because [no label] can’t have subscribers anymore ↩︎

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ah alright. thanks for the clarification chaban!

rally the troops and get editing, its going to be a big project and unlikely a priority for most editors

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Implications of merging aside, old wisdom would suggest to keep the existing entry around (and keep an eye on it even when cleaned up), as otherwise it is likely to be recreated again and again by unsuspecting editors.

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okay okay, let’s do it. I guess there is no easy option. I’m gonna start working on these releases by removing the label entry together with the catno and adding the [no label] entry instead.

I’m open for suggestions for how to split up the workload.

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No worries - I’m pretty busy with work life over the next few days but I should have a bit of time at the weekend to start tackling some of it

I’m working on a playwright script right now to automate the process. The script will do the following:

  • pick the first release from the list of Jamendo page
  • go to the edit page
  • remove Jamendo label and add [no label] and go to finish
  • add some comment and finish the edit
  • repeat the process

is this a stupid idea? I can only think of some releases that maybe have more than just the Jamendo label. so adding [no label] to these wouldn’t be correct. but I think I can catch this case.

When I’m done I’ll post the script here to discuss it.

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okay, here is a python script using playwright to do the work. I didn’t know how to exactly handle the case if there is a second label present, so the loop aborts then.

for it to work you need to do this first:

pip install playwright
playwright install firefox

and here is the script. I already tested it for a few releases and it works just fine. it is not super fast but a lot faster of course than doing it manually.

edit: scroll down for the newest version

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Would it be impossible for a label to release something on Jamendo? (I know nothing about Jamendo)

[no label] - as opposed to leaving the field empty - is imo saying “an editor confirms that this was a self-release”.

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I haven’t seen such a case so far but I wouldn’t say this is impossible. this is why I only replace “Jamendo” with “[no label]” if it is indeed the only label of the release in question. if there is a second label present the script will skip this one.

edit: made some changes to the script to catch timeout errors and avoiding page reloads each iteration.

edit2: there are indeed such releases like this one here

https://musicbrainz.org/edit/121454441

I agree that replacing these made-up Jamendo REs with [no label]/[none] makes it more consistent with digital media releases on other platforms like bandcamp, …
However, simply deleting label and cat# is IMO a significant loss of information.

Jamendo distributes Creative Commons-only music that is submitted/uploaded and administered by the original artists.
If we don’t consider Jamendo a label anymore then all releases that were published there are clearly [no label] releases that have no cat# and no unique identifier other than that Jamendo URL section so the cat# should clearly be [none].

Indeed, there are some netlabels that used Jamendo as an additional distribution platform for their releases. In these cases, the netlabel people managed the Jamendo artist pages as a service for and authorized by the artists.
Examples are afmusic, Ekleipsi, …:
Release group “Adam” by Shearer - MusicBrainz Release group “Feeding the Future” by Jaked off shorts and loaded heads - MusicBrainz
Your last example seems to be a similar case.

But neither the netlabel itself nor the cat# that they use elsewhere are shown on the Jamendo album pages so I think that these can also be considered [no label]/[none] releases.

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Could Jamendo be moved to a “distributor” relationship?

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aerozol does have a point though. we can safely remove Jamendo as a label because it is actually not a music label as we understand it today. but I can’t say whether the release in question does have a proper label or not. adding [no label] entry to these releases would imply that there is none however. can you say that for certain for all these releases?

I see what you mean - up to now all Jamendo releases were easily viewable by the label page on MB. but should we allow pseudo labels for this use case? consider that my initial problem with this was, that I looked at a self-published release by LukHash which was also distributed on many other digital platforms. however Jamendo was listed as the music label which is simply nonsense. who knows how many other releases under this “label” are also available on other sites.

the Jamendo URL itself is still a unique identifier, which can be searched for on MB however. and if one is interested in the listing of all releases on Jamendo, they could add them to a collection or series (?).

@IvanDobsky
wouldn’t this suggest that Jamendo has a unique role compared to other digital platforms - saying that Jamendo also published it on other platforms? again, looking back at my initial problem I would definitely not say that Jamendo is the distributor of “The Other Side” by “LukHash”, considering that there is no mentioning of Jamendo an any of the other digital platforms this album is available.

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