It is not a usual case. I tried to add it according to my knowledge of the guidelines, still many of you know them much much better, so fix it, if something isn’t right!
P. S. I don’t know how to add links to their Wikipedia profiles as ‘official homepages’ because for many Wikipedians this is the only one public link they have and even in YT release description they are credited in this way as “User:username”, which is definitely link to their Wiki profile. Wikipedians are so Wikipedians, I like them XD
“The Birthday Cake Song” is an original song created for the Wikimedia Foundation in occasion of Wikipedia’s 25th Birthday, performed by the WikiChoir, featuring Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons content.
Is there any indication that this is specific to English Wikipedia? If not, then I think linking to profiles there might not be ideal. Maybe link to the meta wiki instead, like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Narumi.SBT?
P.S. Great song and fun corner case, thanks for posting about it!
As release artist I think yeah, it is fair enough to use Wikipedia, because it is published on official Wikipedia YT channel.
I didn’t take into account that it was published on Wikimedia Commons earlier than on YT. Then it has sense to change the recording artist to “Wikimedia Foundation” or “WikiChoir”.
By the way, if Commons and YoutTube release have different art covers, they should be separate releases, isn’t it? Style / Release - MusicBrainz :
Different cover art. Any differences beyond size/quality changes and minor color differences justify multiple releases.
Unfortunately, no. It is not specified, so you’re right
As far as I can tell, the image on Commons isn’t really intended to be cover art, it’s just a frame from the midpoint of the video. I looked at the wiki source too, and didn’t see any indication that anyone uploaded a cover image or chose which frame to use. YouTube video thumbnails can be chosen intentionally, but I don’t know if that one was. Also YouTube video thumbnails can be changed, which could get complicated in this context. Anyway, since the Commons thumbnail appears to be automatically generated from the video with no intent behind its choice, I don’t think that should qualify as a separate release.
I’m not at all sure I’m right, this is pretty far outside of the types of data I usually edit here. I think one release with a release/track artist of “Wikimedia Foundation” (from the Author field on Commons) probably makes sense since that’s the closest to a single clear attribution I see, but I’m not sure.
Good to know! ThenI have one more question. Who is a release artist and how should I choose this artist? I thought that the release artist it is the one, who publish the release, even if that artist doesn’t own the release itself or is not track(s) author. But now I’m a little bit confused
Style / Release - MusicBrainz and Style / Artist Credits - MusicBrainz are the relevant parts of the style guides. The phrase “artist(s) as shown on the release” there is doing a lot of heavy lifting though, especially for things like YouTube videos that aren’t from YouTube Music. I usually look for a clear credit, like if the Label Foo channel releases a video titled “Hit Song by Famous Artist”, I’d set the title to “Hit Song” and the artist to “Famous Artist”. Sometimes the description has a clear credit, like “Artist: Famous Artist feat. Other Artist”. If the channel is “Famous Artist”, “Famous Artist - Topic”, or similar and there’s no other clear credit, I’d use use “Famous Artist” as the artist. In this case the description linked to Commons for more info, so I think using the author there is better than using the channel.
I would credit the performers as the artist, as listed on the official upload (vocalists and instrumentalists):
Nicolas Pacheco Monroy, Jason Wishnow, User:Affandy Murad, User:Bastique, User:Buszmail, User:Ferfive, User:Gnom, User:Letherian3, User:Lucas_Werkmeister, User:Misosoof, User:Narumi.SBT, User:New_York-air, User:NikosLikomitros, User:Pymouss, User:Wadakuramon
Unless these performers (or Wikipedia more loosely) has formed a “group” with any commonly referred to name (official or not), this will be best. “Wikipedia” is not an artist.
The entity that ‘publishes’ a release is often the label or a distributor. The artist is the musician (or creative person/band/entity) that made the music.
With this release it is hard though, since so many names are credited. But WikiChoir is explicitly mentioned as a ‘group’ name here so that might be better.
Great job by the way, really interesting release to store!
I suspect that has more to do with how they organize their YouTube channel(s) than any decision about releasing that specific music/video, given how long it was from the initial release to the YT upload.
