"Music video" as ETI

According to the ETI style guideline,

Some cases of additional information that is not part of the title and also not intended to distinguish the track should be removed:

“Song (bonus track)”: just “Song”
“Song (new song)”: just “Song”
“Song (The Beatles cover)”: just “Song”, with the recording linked to the appropriate The Beatles work with the recording of relationship (and the “cover” attribute).

If a track is listed as “SongName (music video)” on the back cover, do I remove that ETI? I can always recording-recording relationships to link the audio track with its music video, just like the Beatles example above. But it can also be argued that “(music video)” is intended to distinguish the audio track and the video track, which would be named the same otherwise. So does this mean the ETI should only be removed when the audio and the music video are on the same medium (since having the audio on a CD and the music video on a DVD can already distinguish the two, printing “(music video)” was not intended to distinguish)?

I usually add this to the disambiguation comment only and don’t consider it part of the title. IMHO it really is more like that “(bonus song)” example, something on the release to make clear this is a different kind of media. But I see how one could argue otherwise.

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I agree. I wouldn’t consider it useful ETI on in the track title as the tracklist displays the :tv: symbol if the recording is marked correctly anyway. I believe the symbol is shown beside the title of the recording wherever it is displayed so one could argue the disambiguation is also not necessary.

I’ve seen cases where there was more than one video recording of a particular song on the same release. This seems to be fairly common for concert videos, which sometimes include music videos as bonus features.

Again, this does not take into account cases of more than one video recording existing of the same song by the same artist. I’ve had to defend adding “music video” as a recording disambiguation for this reason; sometimes people ignore the :tv: symbol and merge video recordings with audio-only recordings, or they don’t realize that multiple different video recordings exist and merge them all together.

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In my opinion, it should be removed. The recording can and should be designated as a video so it is completely redundant.

If there are different versions of a music video disambiguation describing the deferences is appropriate. But to me “music video” as disambiguation is just redundant.

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In the concert video case, the concert video should have live style disambiguation. Just like any live recording. The “studio” music video doesn’t need any disambiguation except where there are multiple versions of a music video just like any audio recording with different mixes, extended versions, etc.

People make mistakes merging all the time, I don’t see this as a terribly common error in my experience (merging an audio recording with a video or a live video with a “music video”) but that is what voting is for. Same things happen with different versions of audio recordings and we just all have to do our best to prevent and fix mistakes.

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For tracks: If printed tracklist shows it, I put it in track name.

Because music clip is something else than live clip, rehearsal take 1, etc.
Video track does not always mean music video.

For recordings, I prefer setting this in comment but if all tracks have it in their title, I might set it in the recording title as well.

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Yes of course, there can be multiple different music videos for the same song, but then if they all had “music video” as a disambiguation or ETI that wouldn’t help distinguishing them from each other. For me then the question is if “video” makes sense as part of the disambiguation. Whether the track/recording is e.g. displayed as ":tv: Song (clean video) " or just “:tv: Song (clean)” doesn’t make much difference imo.
That said I also don’t see how the word “video” hurts as part of a disambiguation and I have used it myself from time to time.

That’s true. The :tv: symbol is definitely not as distinguishing as an ETI or disambiguation. There is the “is music video of” relationship for actual music videos, but that relationship is not as visible as an ETI or disambiguation.

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Oh yes, if it is only the word video or its equivalent is another language, I do not keep it. We already have our video flag.
But music video for me is another thing, and I keep it.

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Doesn’t the music video/music video for recording-recording relationship achieve the same thing?

For the most part.
However, even if such a relationship is used, it’s not possible to see it (or any other advanced relationship, for that matter) from certain pages, in particular the Recordings tab on an artist page. It’s not inconceivable that someone would mistakenly reuse such a recording (by copying and pasting the URL when entering a release) or merge it with another (using the check boxes on the left side of the page and the “Add selected recordings for merging” button at the bottom of the page) in the absence of any indication what the video content is, be it ETI or a disambiguation.

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Would it be better to add it as a disambiguation and not an ETI? Or as an ETI for the track but not the recording? How should I interpret the style guideline?

I would interpret it something like this:

  • If the release has ETI for the track, use the provided ETI for both the track and recording.
  • If there’s no ETI on the track, add the recording with a disambiguation.

I modeled my interpretation for the first bullet point after the ETI section of the existing recording guideline.

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