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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