I’m a bit of a fan of musical television and films, and wondering if there’s a sensible way to include the information into MusicBrainz. In particular, scripted works (like Galavant or La La Land) rather than live shows with performances (like Top of the Pops or Graham Norton). And original songs - either written for the show (e.g. Crazy Ex Girlfriend) or covers peformed by the cast (e.g. Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist).
Where a soundtrack album has been released that contains all songs from the work, that’s easy. Where that hasnt, it’s trickier.
I’ve got a couple of ideas:
individual works linked together with the Part Of work-work rel to create episodes or a film.
OR recordings linked together as a Broadcast Soundtrack release group. (TV shows are broadcast whether over the air or streaming; films feel spiritually broadcast in the cinema even when it really was reels of film being carted about.)
For release type, the show is released to the world as an episode or film, so Official, but not in the traditional ‘music release’ way so perhaps Bootleg?
Sometimes specific songs are released on youtube as episode excerpts, which could be standalone recordings if not collected.
Would need both works and recordings to capture the writers information, as well as the performers (actor names, rather than characters).
Use of Series to link episodes together.
I had a look but didn’t see any discussion of this exact idea - live performances, yes (Music Television as Events) but scripted TV, not really.
All thoughts welcomed, I think this would fit with the MusicBrainz intent but no point starting if not
according to them, works from TV series should be all grouped under one Soundtrack work for the whole show
for example, The Goof Off here is under the big soundtrack work My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, even though there’s multiple songs in this particular episode of the show. the episode name should go in the disambiguation too
I will also note that (at least to my knowledge) only songs written for the movie or show should go under the soundtrack work, so a soundtrack like Baby Driver or Pulp Fiction (both of which mostly use existing recordings as their soundtrack) would be missing most of the songs that appear in the movie (neither has a soundtrack work as of yet). I know there has been a few discussions about changing this, like here
for live shows with performances, I’m not sure how best to handle these, and I don’t really have much input here either. a release might make sense, but as far as I know there’s no precedent for such a release
YouTube videos can and should be added as releases, so at worst, these can likely be added (official channels are preferred, but unofficial/bootleg releases should be fine if there’s not an official release)
I’ve had a think about this one too, in a way you could probably bend the rather vague broadcast format to do it but it’d need some planning and testing to see how it works. We’d also need to work out exactly what we do and don’t want to record in that sense before people start adding every single show that contains even a little bit of music under the sun into MusicBrainz; again this is where something like FilmBrainz and inter-project rels would work well IMO.
However for shows with a live audience (doesn’t always mean they are broadcast live) that have music performances (like Top of the Pops, CD:UK, TFI Friday, GN Show, Jonathan Ross Show) then we are for the moment simply recording these as an event, and inputting the performances in as a set list. That may not be the perfect solution going forward but it works for the moment.
Going back to OP’s question about adding music entries for things that show up in TV/Film that don’t have a suitable companion soundtrack release, I have actually been adding these into the database like so for the moment:
Create a standalone recording with the items name (if known of course)
Set the artist on that recording to whoever is performing the song (artist name usually, not in universe character name)
Create a work and link that to the recording, if you can work out who wrote it then you can add those relationships to this entity. If its a parody or a version of you can also make those relationships too.
That at least gets the song data into the database, we can then work out how we link those together after.
You’ll get into hot water quickly if you start adding fake releases, certainly if you’ve got no proof that bootleg ever existed.
I think what we need to do is explore more how we could use the Broadcast entity type in a way that is smart.
Part of me would love to see that every show that contained music gets included in this, but another part of me thinks that will muddy the database very quickly (think that would mean every single episode of say Scrubs, The Shield or The Wire could be added in theory as they all use various bits of music during the show, and some of those are original).
For starters, I think my rough line in the sand for what I’m considering (so you can see) is only fictional films or shows that include a performance of music, in order of ‘importance’ roughly: from shows with original music (Galavant) > shows that have performances of non-original music as a key feature (Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, Glee) > shows that have performances by characters or real bands of non-original music as an occasional feature (like bands playing at The Bronze in Buffy, or characters singing karaoke in Angel). I’d be ignoring shows/films that only have existing music that are not performed specifically for it; like @sound.and.vision suggest, that would become a lot.
@sound.and.vision I like your three steps, and @UltimateRiff collecting them into one large soundtrack work per the style guide makes sense.
I guess the question here is, what is fake? A TV episode is the ‘real thing’ that the songs come from. So an RG could be a bootleg in that the audio hasn’t been released officially and separately, but official in that the episode was broadcast or released on DVD etc. But perhaps even a Broadcast Soundtrack RG doesn’t quite fit right; could you just use omitting all the non-musical parts, or would you need to list it as [dialogue] [dialogue] ? And at that point, definitely veered away from MusicBrainz into a FilmBrainz world…
Perhaps using a Series would be a least-worst way to collect songs into episodes. Though episode names should go into disambiguation, there’s no real sorting or collecting happening there as episode numbering isn’t included in the disambig. Maybe I just shouldn’t consider that.
Seperately:
I’ve just been adding music videos in the past as standalone recordings. Should they have an associated Broadcast release with them?
there’s been quite a bit of discussion on similar topics (with @sound.and.vision in the center of most of them, lol), if you wanna read up on what the forums have thought
I think this could be valuable data, but I don’t know how best to fit it into our data model without some changes to the data model? (like a new release type or even a new entity type)
as in music videos that were broadcast on TV? if so, then probably not, but there’s currently discussion over here (where we can continue, if you’d like)
Mainly music videos from after streaming existed, thankfully - I’ve chipped in on that thread, very interesting reading.
From the threads you linked, definitely musical TV falls closer to a standard music release than some of the fringe options! Some of the newer video concept albums that exist, and musical films by bands (like The Beatles) definitely fuzz that line too.
What I’ve done for now, I went through the Galavant works and added disambigs as per the Soundtrack guidelines. When doing so, I’ve found maybe five out of ~70 songs in the show didn’t have corresponding digital releases of some kind. So I’ve added those as individual Works (which feels non-controversial), named as per Soundtrack guides and with creatives linked, and then added a standalone recording linked to that work in order to capture the Performing Artist (which hopefully isn’t controversial either as we can point to the show as the source). And I’ll not worry about releases/release groups for those. It seems like a good route to capture the information I’d like to, without causing too much of a database headache down the line.
Looking for some community feedback now I’ve done a couple of shows.
shows of original works. This seems to be no issue, and can be easily linked into one comprehensive Soundtrack work, e.g. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend at Soundtrack “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” - MusicBrainz
The latter is a little awkward. Per Soundtrack Work guidelines, the episode title can go into the disambiguation, and can be linked into a ‘complete soundtrack’ Work. It would be… probably disliked if that was to happen to a ‘real’ work, I think.
So I have made new Works and set them as later versions of the original. Could these be classed as different “arrangements” perhaps? Version seems nebulously (in)accurate enough. Does mixing in spoken or sung dialogue lines or breaking a traditionally solo song into a duet or ensemble piece count as enough of a variation? (But we have both Cash and NIN’s versions of Hurt as one Work so, probably not.)
It could be argued that the individual recordings maintain their link to the Show through the Releases they feature on; that’s true except for the many songs that are not on a traditional release and only exist as part of the television broadcast. We don’t have a defined way to add television episodes of non-live material really.
A counterpoint to this all though is Glee, where all released songs are just associated to the original work. I don’t know yet if unreleased performances (if any) from the show are on MB yet. I intend to stay away from changing existing ARs on Glee as they’re not wrong.
An editor has suggested merging the new works I created for Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist (see Edit #123083943 - MusicBrainz) so I think it wise to get more community feedback before I keep going and/or they merge all the works.
Edit: I think the key point I’d like from the waffle above is how to have a Complete Soundtrack Work properly without making existing works less useful.
It seems wrong that (to take just one example) the Zoey’s version of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction is somehow a unique work while Devo, Genesis, Bruce Springsteen etc. versions are all recordings of the original.
I personally think creating a new work to capture a relationship that doesn’t apply to the original work is somewhat reasonable. the guidelines for Version of do say there needs to be “significant changes to the lyrics or music”, but I don’t know that there’s been much discussion on what “significant” means, especially in terms of the music… (there’s similar language on the Arrangement and Based on relationships)
somewhat similarly, I’ve actually started creating arrangement works for video game songs that get arranged for newer games (Gourmet Race is a good example here), whereas most editors have used one work for the original game and new arrangements, like the Pokémon Center theme
I find it odd to make new version of a work just because something was played in a show. It is common for covers to make variations - it is part of them being covers.
If every time music appeared in a show it got a new work it would become chaotic.
I guess this is to get around the quirk that Soundtracks are not allowed to have covers as part of them. This feels a wrong way to do it.
is there any way to view the content from the show online so we can make an educated guess as to whether the performance is varied enough to create a new work?
Even if there were, we don’t generally create new works for one-off arrangements; that’s normally captured via an ‘arranger’ relationship on the recording.
I’ve seen some “broadcast” RGs created for Peel Sessions even if there’s no commercial release (under 3 Mustaphas 3, for example). There remains the question of where to draw the line between “broadcast of a music performance” and “broadcast containing incidental music” but for a music-heavy scripted show, what are the drawbacks of using a similar approach?
@sound.and.vision Subsets of the performances from the episodes are available on Spotify etc, in some cases these aren’t edited exactly as on the show. Legally in UK, only through purchase on Amazon Prime and no DVD release, but I know there’s some rips of songs on YouTube. I’ll edit some links for both in shortly.
These are definitely choreographed and (to some extent) arranged performances, rather than incidental uses of the songs in the show’s background.
@aerozol I think its interesting metadata to capture, and in many cases, recording data to capture, about shows with either original songs [not controversial] or unique performances of existing songs [somewhat iffy to fit into MB]. It could be done without the overall complete Soundtrack Work but I think some way to group them together is needed or they’re just a bit orphany.
@highstrung I like this idea, Broadcast would fit, though it was suggested upthread I think that adding ‘fake’ releases might be a problem, as a TV episode isn’t a traditional type of release, so I figured the Works were the best way to represent this.
Streaming releases with the songs that have been released as audio-only can be found in this series of RGs: Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist - MusicBrainz. (This doesn’t double as equivalent to a Complete Soundtrack as a fair chunk of the songs are missing.)
Some video examples on YouTube (there doesn’t appear to be an official ZEP playlist from NBC, not available in the UK at least, so these are all varying quality rips):
From the season finale 1x12 (SPOILERS): American Pie as an ensemble piece. I can only find it visually in parts on YouTube: 123 and this misses the following part with Jane Levy singing a verse again, a cappella - which the Spotify release also misses out.
From 2x04, Lizzo’s Juice (YouTube) - there’s a line of dialogue cut from the middle of this in the YouTube rip, but this dialogue is present in the Spotify release.
Slight variations and pauses is not a new arrangement. It is just the style of the cover.
Dialogue over a track does not make it an arrangement. It is just background. The music is separate to the words, just this recording may have someone talking over it.
A track split up is just partial,
Dialogue over a track does not make it an arrangement. It is just background.
There should always be some leeway in a performance of a Work. It is still the same work. Cover versions especially tend to stray from the exact original changing vocal styles or swapping instruments. They are still covers of the original work. Not a new work.
But I see a more fundamental problem. How can these works be included in a Soundtrack when we cannot link to works like this in a film Soundtrack? A film like Pulp Fiction uses plenty of popular tunes in the movie, but we cannot mark these as part of the Soundtrack.
These are not songs written for the TV show. Just cover performances of those songs. So breaks the guidelines and can’t be part of a MB soundtrack.
It is certainly interesting data, but it breaks the guidelines to call these Soundtracks.
