I think we may be still on different angles here, so please understand I speak with the primary effort of MB. This is a long post, so if you have no interest, don’t read it. I make an effort to explain my thoughts vs just listing them with no explanation.
First off, I think the best MB can ever do is to most accurately represent a release. To say no one will ever get a good database so why try is not how things work, or you would not be posting to a forum on the internet as no one would have bothered to invent it. But as you have mentioned, this comes at a price, and one must consider the trade off as diminishing returns come into play. The music industry has their own issue dealing with royalties and how they are paid, but I will add that I believe other high profile systems (like MB) do not help. Using iTunes as an example, and I do this because of the digital sales that I Am aware of, iTunes is at the top being the general winner in the area of volume, consistency of metadata, and correctness of metadata. Please note that I use correctness cautiously.
The ISRC, in my opinion, is one of the most important pieces of metadata for digital releases. Let me explain. With vinyl, cassette, CD, etc, you have things like a barcode which is visible on the release. That is a MAJOR identifier of a release. Please note that I am aware that nothing is ever perfect and even same barcodes can and do appear on different releases. Some CDs do embed ISRC, but that metadata is not as easy to extract and is not always even there. Additionally, you have a physical media. There is printing and well, the look of the media as a whole. If that is all captured, you can with good confidence identify a release, thus also being able to follow the chain to who did and/or gets paid for what.
Now we live in different times. Rather than royalties coming from radio and media sales, streaming is a major portion of that revenue and physical media sales continue to diminish. This complicates things because if a song is listened to, how do we know how to properly identify it? As I see it, at a radio station, this is easy. The station is provided the music directly with the identifiers, so when they play a recording they should know exactly what they are playing. When it comes to streaming sites, I sort of agree on your angle and your points. As it relates to MB, that is where I disagree. You are correct, I believe, that with a source like Spotify that it is easy to trace the play back to the royalty. Spotify was given the recording, and the organization that provided them that recording and metadata should know what they provided. The same applies to Apple Music on streaming. Where this gets muddy for MB is we do not know what we do or do not know. What? I mean that Sporify and Apple disclose to us a set of metadata that can be extracted from using things like JSON from the sites. We know that, but what we do not know is if there is more data that is not disclosed to us users that can identify those recordings. Now realistically, we know that not all is disclosed to us.
Please stay with me, I am trying to explain in enough detail to create the conversation, as I agree it can be helpful… Now we get to digital download sources, like iTunes, Amazon, etc. Now we have the same issue here. The releases all contain metadata put in place by the vendor/distributor. That data is holding the same issue as the streaming, what is it and what is it not? You may have one barcode on the iTunes file and a different barcode on the Amazon file and in reality they could be the same product, meaning that it is all from the same source. We simply do not know. Although we cannot be sure there, we can use the metadata and attributes like container, encoder, encoder settings, etc to identify it. That is the same logic as a physical release… we use all we can to identify something. On a CD, the color of the case matters in MB but a MP3 is considered no different from a M4A, and that makes no sense to me at all given the scope of physical releases.
It is my opinion that in order to become a leader in music metadata, you need to be more accurate on representing a release. I speak not of physical media as that is fairly well done. But over the last 20 years or so, it no longer applies to current releases as it once did, and no one is adapting. What I do is represent a release to start with. So I have a vendor (what MB sometimes does and does not consider to be a release label), ISRC, store ID(s), etc. If any of those attributes change, I do not consider it a duplicate recording. So if I have release ABC from iTunes, Amazon, and other companies, I absolutely consider those different releases and different recordings. This is where that layer between the release and recording is missing in MB. As a user, those are certainly different. But as it relates to the source / master, they may be all the same. Often times, we really do not know. That also opens up again the point I had on mastering and where it does and does not apply.
How can I relate this vs just posting a ton of words, let’s say that I am a “personal Spotify” and I broadcast from my music collection. Now, I need to pay royalties for each recording I stream. I know who to add a play to because I can identify what I played. I might have song 123 and play it, but I also know what release it came from, what vendor/distributor it came from, etc. From there, it is up to that source to do the same, know where their product comes from. On my end, the best I can do is accurately represent what I have. Does this mean that I end up with a lot of duplicate recording, sure. As an end user of 10+ terabytes of music am I ok with those duplicates, absolutely. I am happy to go into why, but that is not so relevant to this here, so I will not go into that. So for me, to use MB to identify and index my music is a downgrade. If I were to tag my files in MB, I would lose data and accuracy. This makes MB useless to be as a tagging source. I am able to use MB though to get data on the release side, but other than that, I can only use it from things like lookups (what bands did this artist perform with, what releases include this recording, etc). But for further detail, MB drops the ball and my metadata as provided by the vendor is far more accurate to thoroughly identify what the recording actually is.
So to me concern which is MB, it cannot be targeted to me as a tagging source. It cannot be marketed to record labels to identify their royalties and all that mess. I cannot use it to identify a recording like a Shazzam type directly, it cannot properly identify remasters in a sense that one CD can have a piss poor master and another have a great master but MB marks them as a duplicate recording (but they most certainly are not from the perspective of the listener), etc. What is MB trying to accomplish in the modern day? It is amazing at a historical perspective like cassettes, vinyls, CDs, etc, that is for sure. So my angle on this is that MB does nothing to contribute to the modern era of music. This is also then indirectly contributing to the problem of royalties. Although the music industry has their own issues with it, MB does not even accurately account for what they do have. I hope that explains my thoughts vs just tossing my opinion out there on this. It is one of the main reasons I do not spend my time with edits anymore as I feel I just dry the top of the tire as it continues to roll through the water. A lot of work and nothing real gets accomplished. I do take the time to discuss here though as I believe there is good to be done, and if I can help shape that for the better, than it is time well spent.
