I’d argue that the MB entry titled “-” is completely wrong, but I’m not sure whether it should be changed to [untitled] or to “Blank Project”. On one hand “Blank Project” to me could mean that the artist explicitly wanted the albums to have no title at all (supported by the first set of links), but on the other hand “Blank Project” is a title from the artist directly so it could be seen to qualify for the “known title” that should be used instead of [unknown] or [untitled].
I’d go with “Blank Project” as MB literally can’t have no name for a Release. I expect this is why someone called it “-”. I’d add notes in the annotation about the different names on different platforms.
Interesting to see that Bandcamp allows a zero length album name. As MB can’t fit “artist intent” of no title, then “artist’s alternate title” seems a fair enough compromise.
The Bandcamp titles aren’t actually empty; the titles (of all three of the blank-titled releases) are two of the Unicode character U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK in sequence. That Unicode character is invisible, creating this effect.
It seems to not play nicely with the MusicBrainz edit form, though.
You can track down Unicode shenanigans like this by (in Firefox) right clicking and choosing “View Page Source” on the Bandcamp page, searching for a line of text with the release data. That line will look something like:
Then finding the "name":" key in it and selecting from there to the following ", copying it, and pasting it into What Unicode character is this ? and clicking “Identify”.
I care about artist intent. If it’s purely to trick a service that’s something else, but the artist here has explicitly told us that it’s not an ‘empty’ title.
I haven’t seen any other Bandcamp pages with those characters in the name (checked a few because I had that same suspicion), so I think that may not be the case.
I also tried using wget to download the first one of those links and opened the file in a hex editor to double-check; the "name":"Rave Down Babylon" part didn’t have any bytes that would suggest the presence of any non-ASCII characters.
I don’t know whether artist intent is to include those left-to-right mark characters, versus the intent being a truly empty title, though!
You’re right.
It’s just a way to obtain an empty title in bandcamp.
Bandcamp may block empty titles but those users can use any invisible character that is not blocked by bandcamp, to get their empty titles:
In MusicBrainz, these releases usually get the artist name as release title.
In my release’s case, I thought about what I wanted the title to be, and picked Mongolian vowel separator[1]. I didn’t leave the field blank to indicate that I wanted the release to go by my own name.
In the U+200E LRM case, while I don’t know what the artist intended, I really doubt they would have put in the effort to find U+200E if they wanted the release to have the same name as the artist. With physical cover art, it makes sense to avoid duplicating the artist and release title if they’re the same. But on Bandcamp, you have to fill out both fields (I think), and copy/pasting is probably easier that finding an invisible unicode character for most people. Also, I’m guessing that artists using Bandcamp are at least somewhat thinking about file tags, so they’d put a release title that they want in the album tag.
That character has some fun properties because it changed Unicode categories, which causes different versions of different software to sometimes disagree about how to sanitize text that contains it. So it can break software in fun ways that other invisible characters generally can’t. Plus using it was a bit of a running joke in a group I used to be in. All of which to say, it really was not an arbitrary choice. ↩︎
