but this isn’t the 80s, and a ton of music is released only through YouTube. the whole genre of YTPMVs (and also MADs) were built on these platforms. while sometimes the thumbnail is auto-selected, more often than not, it is the only cover art associated with a release
Thumbnails are also made to promote a single. Thumbnails are what show up as suggestion. Hell sometimes you can call them click bait, just like a poster or cover is made to draw your attention to the work before you ever heard it.
I can see why you would rather keep them limited to a standalone recording, but it does have copyright, does have a release date, does have a promoting image which represents the music art. In other words, it is something which got released. Maybe a different kind of release, but a release non the less.
also wanted to add, according to a recent poll I started, more editors think videos should be added as releases than not, with an even split on whether to have a seperate release group for videos, from the thread I linked above.
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Doubt that makes a difference because musicbrainz isn’t a democracy, but we do agree on the what and the why, and beyond what a majority think it just makes semantic sense that video has been released to the public at some point. We can’t keep pretending videos and thumbnails are recordings without release without discarding relevant data and thumbnail art in doing so. And while we wait a couple people are actively deleting releases which is a destructive action. Mildly frustrated that people are ganging together to invalidate releases just because they don’t match their archaic expectations.
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this is true, I was mostly saying there’s no clear consensus among editors, just a simple slight majority (of a fairly small sample of active editors)… the only argument I’ve seen against this so far is editors linking to that 8-year-old quote of @reosarevok stating what they’ve seen done in the past and that we should maybe hold off on adding them until they have a place. no reason we can’t change that now tho~
my opinion is also that we’re losing valuable data on these official releases just because of the opinions of a few editors, and I just think that’s real disappointing… I’ve even seen a fair bit of my contributions deleted because of this (tho only after looking through an edit search or two)… (I will note a few of these edits are quite possibly non-music releases, which probably don’t have a place in MusicBrainz, I can’t speak for all of these tho)
edit: one last thing to add before I leave for the day, currently there’s no good home I’ve found for music videos in any database except for MusicBrainz… IMDB doesn’t have the concept of music works (and isn’t open data), IMVDb isn’t active and requires approval for additions to be visible, and the Music Video Database is very bare bones at best (and I don’t know how open it is, both to submissions and to data use). I did just find Mvdbase, but don’t know anything about it, since they’re down for maintenance currently
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I’m sorry but the idea of a music video not being a release is just ridiculous to me, when we have thousands of examples that they’re very much are. Every music video in Spotify is treated as a release. They even have unique barcodes. They have been treated as releases in Mora for ages and though Apple Music has a different category for them, they still have unique barcodes that can be viewed using source code and binary viewers. How are those not evidences of a release?
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Throwing insults at people not realizing they are on the same team as you and have been thinking about it for years. That’s sad.
There are still open questions that miss answers and probably more that have yet to be asked (or are buried in someone’s collection with thousands of music videos…).
Every music video in Spotify is treated as a release
I have yet to come across a single video in Spotify. Would you be a dear and thoroughly document this feature? It seems quite limited still
When is now and does it come with code changes and redesign? BTW, some of the schema changes from 2017 and 2019 are still not implemented in the UI
https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Development/Priorities#MusicBrainz.2FCAA
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I’m not insulting anybody. I said the idea that is being thrown around is ridiculous, which it is. I wasn’t even adressing you and if you’re talking about the note I left in your edits, that wasn’t an insult either.
If anything, this is what is insulting. Telling an editor to not do something because we’re going to delete it. It’s just so counterintuitive and it solves nothing.
It is limited because it still being developed. It’s in a beta state, so you’re not going to find an entire videography of an artist there yet. Some don’t even have anything, but it’s there. It’s also not available in every country and at least I can’t access it on the app, only in the web version.
And here’s the above release on a-tisket: https://atisket.pulsewidth.org.uk/?preferred_countries=GB%2CUS%2CDE&spf_id=1DYWU6Zer0ncB1z7p0OcJO&preferred_vendor=spf
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I apologize if it was me throwing the insults… I just saw pages of release removal edits, including one of mine, seemingly just because they’re YouTube releases, and got unreasonably angry. I’m sure that’s not the intent, and hope we can continue to work together~
now can be whenever, I think, because we’ve already got the robust release system which can handle music videos already, whether they’re in their own release group or not
my opinion is that imprecise data is better than no data (as long as it’s not incorrect). if there’s no data about these releases, how will anyone know to fix it later?
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Like others wrote, I’m what we an do this week is settle for a way ahich does not destroy data while a permanent solution is in the makes. I found myself searching for release dates, downloading converting and uploading thumbnails, only for someone to delete it with two clicks and a vague refeeence to the general consensus. Let’s stop that and see about the rest after?
Will that pollude the database with releases? Not really. We do mark those recordings as video, and link the release to a youtube url, and mark te recording as musi video. They can be identified in the future with a query on the database.
It already looks so unfortunately: Tag “music video” - MusicBrainz
You can already do all of that at recording level, without having to put the video in a bogus release.
if these are bogus releases, then how do you propose we store release dates, labels, cover art, and release areas?
I think the release system is very well suited to house this data, we just need a few tweaks to the display side. I don’t think that should be reason to keep this data out of the database
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We could ever differentiate between lyrics videos and actual music clips, but either way it has a cover art (thumbnail) and own release moment and often own release details and description.
I’m slowly moving towards “maybe it’s okay to store videos as releases” (but we still need to come up with a good way to do so) but I’m very much not sold yet on “thumbnail is the same as cover art”. Isn’t the thumbnail often just a screengrab from a frame of the video that can vary in different video sites?
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Are music videos being released? Yes. Do music videos have their own recordings? Sometimes, but not necessarily, they could use a recording that is also used elsewhere. Maybe I’m missing something, as I often do, but doesn’t this imply that they are indeed releases rather than (standalone) recordings?
On the subject of cover art. I think YT-thumbnails are often carefully selected because they can have quite an impact on how much audience is attracted to the music video. Is it cover art? Well…
" An album cover (also referred to as album art) is the front packaging art of a commercially released studio album or other audio recordings"
(Album cover - Wikipedia)
Is it much of a stretch to consider the thumbnail the front packaging of the music video?
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I personally don’t really watch them, but I can’t really see why we would store the date (etc) for a digital single, but we would relegate a single that came with/as a music video to recordings-only.
Sometimes it feels like we are putting up walls for people who engage with music in different or new ways.
Regardless of my feelings on that though, this reads like there’s been mass deleting when there’s been quite a lot of community/forum discussion in the last year or two, where users have discussed adding videos as releases. And none of the people deleting/voting for removal have openly said there, that I’ve seen, that they will delete all that work? To put it mildly, that seems dysfunctional for a community.
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Maybe I’m being obtuse here, but adding data knowingly in a way that goes against the recommendation of the style leader who has repeatedly said “please just add them as standalone recordings for now” seems a lot more dysfunctional to me than people then changing that data to follow the currently standard way of adding them.
In fact, it is very similar to my mind than people adding titles in ways that do not follow the guidelines because they prefer them like that and then being surprised that they get changed to actually follow the guidelines and their extra work was lost.
A lot of discussion does not mean you should jump over before any conclusions have been reached and start changing things to be as you want, not as they are agreed so far. I don’t want to belittle the work involved - I just wish people would put that effort in coming up with a complete proposal and getting it past me first, and then adding the videos as agreed.
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I think it’s a stretch to say that a user “knows” not to add video releases.
This thread was in Jan 2022, has 1,600 views, and links to YouTube videos as releases in the OP. Not a mention of those releases needing to be deleted.
If I was active in that thread, and happened to miss mention of ‘video releases will be deleted/are not allowed for now’ elsewhere, and had spent the intervening two years of my free time adding releases, I would find other places to volunteer my time (after punching a hole in the wall, tbh).
I think comparing these users to people who purposefully ignore existing guidelines is unfair. One of our top, if not #1, complaints is that our guidelines are hard to find, not to mention that in this case there aren’t any guidelines to ignore in the first place.
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very occasionally, and especially for reuploads of music videos, but usually I’ve seen unique thumbnail art for music videos and lyric videos, often to add the title or label to the thumbnail (like the two releases I shared above as examples)
edit: either way, if I’m putting together a library of music videos on Plex or Jellyfin or something like that, I’d like to be able to pull some sort of cover art for the cases where there is unique thumbnail art
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Ok. I’m going to start a thread entirely focused on finally agreeing on a way to do these releases, one step at a time. It might be a slow process, so bear with me through it and maybe we can come out with something useful we all agree on 
Edit: Now done:
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