Just repeating one point from the edit notes that you might have missed: Why would a “is music video for” recording-recording relationship exist if the recordings could be merged?
I commented on the edit, but for future reference: yes, videos should be a separate recording and ideally “stream video for free” should not be used outside videos. We just don’t have any way of enforcing relationship constraints to this level (we can say “it must be a recording” but not “it must be a specific type of recording”).
I would make (and have made) an exception for YouTube videos with just audio and a static image, e.g. this.
For obvious reasons, this should be restricted to videos from official sources, such as the artist, their label or those “(Artist) - Topic” audio-only channels.
I wiuld say that the video attribute is only appropriate on non-video recordings. If the recording is a video, stream-for-free is correct and complete.
I’m not a fan of the is-music-video of rec-rec AR. Music Videos rarely exactly match a non-video recording audio-wise. They generally just separate recordings if a work (possibly based on some existing tecording, usually a single edit). Is-music-video-for as a rec-work AR makes more sense to me (to differentiate it from live videos etc).
I would not be opposed to a bot that:
removes the video attribute from stream-for-free on video recordings
for non-video recordings, creates a video version of that recording and moves the stream-for-free to it
After that, the attribute could be deprecated, with the description explaining that videos need separate recording entities.
I can see how one might understand these relstionships that way, but afaik that’s the exact opposite of how they are supposed to be used
According to the documentation the audio doesn’t have to match exactly, but e.g. the clean video can be linked to the clean audio and explicit to explicit.