Our general principle is that all music belongs in MusicBrainz, as per our About page:
“We do not discriminate or prefer one “type” of music over another, and we try to collect information about as many different types of music as possible. Whether it is published or unpublished, popular or fringe, western or non-western, human or non-human — we want it all in MusicBrainz.”
In the last few years we’ve started seeing an annoying trend where non-musical people will (assumingly for SEO) get “music” made for them, which then gets uploaded to streaming sites. In some cases this is not even music, but just a spoken voice. This theoretically means they qualify for a MusicBrainz entry, but this just helps them with their fraudulent SEO, which is not really something we want to do.
We discussed this during today’s team meeting and decided that we’re going to consider this sort of spammy releases as a breach of point 9 of our code of conduct (“Do not abuse or game any of our projects”).
As such, if you see a release that is clearly spam rather than legitimate music, you should remove it as going against the code of conduct, and report the adding editor if it seems they intentionally added it and they are not a good-faith editor. Err on the side of caution though - a company jingle is not spam in itself, and if a person whose main job is not music makes some actual music for fun, that should still be accepted; we want to avoid bad-faith releases, not everything promotional in nature.
We hope this helps limit the amount of this content added to MusicBrainz without compromising our acceptance of legitimate audio. We will revisit this decision as needed if it proves too little or too much.
