In case anyone has some (a lot) of spare time and wants to do some cleanup, there’s a pretty huge (and growing) mess under the “Strictly The Best” artist: Strictly The Best - MusicBrainz
Somehow all of this got added in the last two days (starting with Edit #154203535 - MusicBrainz), but there are tons of issues just from glancing at it:
These are almost all compilations and should be credited to Various Artists.
The release dates for these digital media releases are completely bogus; plenty are listed as 1990s and some are even 1900 (probably typos).
The language guidelines aren’t followed at all; everything’s just being bulk-imported from Spotify.
Plenty of featured artists listed in track titles, e.g. here.
I can see them all over Discogs as CD and LP releases. All as Various.
I’d strip all the dates before 2011. Even the newer ones I’d doubt are legit and expect this was just dropped on the streaming platforms in the past year or so if there is no other traces of this series.
Really I’d just delete all dates as unprovable, but that would upset someone.
This is one of those places we need editors skilled in writing scripts to respond to this kind of hidden script abuse. The Script Automation Service (SAS) we can call on for clean ups…
Nice. I’d like to help out with the tidy up (and listen to some of these)
Once the recordings have been merged, is the next step going into the digital one and selecting the original release group? (checking there’s not already a digital)
If so, would that automatically delete the now empty spurious release group?
Thanks.
Technical answer is - Yes. Assuming nothing is linked to that other release group, it would self destruct.
You will get told by other editors that you should merge it… but I guess that editor will not be working on fixing this heap of bogus additions. So use the above knowledge as you require.
You get Orphan Recordings when you delete a Release and some of the recordings in that Release had Works or AcoustIDs attached.
The tip when deleting a Release is before you hit Remove look at the edit history of the Release and find the original edit that added the Medium. Stash a link to that edit in your Remove edit note and you can then come back and clean up afterwards. After the Release has been deleted all the Orphans will show up to allow a cleanup
Before I saw this thread I’ve submitted an edit to merge this into V/A, the singles attached have been handled by someone else so it’s just the V/As remaining on the profile
Thanks for all the help cleaning this up, everyone!
This is a pattern that I’ve seen before, where a streaming service credits an album to some label’s name instead of to “Various Artists”, so an editor creates a new bogus artist for the label and bulk-imports a bunch of (often-duplicate) releases there. This seems pretty common (although sometimes neither artist is VA, like in the case of a cover album):
I wonder if there’s anything the MBS could do to warn people who are doing this. I’m not sure how expensive it’d be to make the release editor look for releases with similar titles and tracklists whenever someone seeds a release…
so I might play it safe and merge…