HMV.co.jp is often entered as the site for “purchased for mail-order” in Japanese releases. The raw URL of HMV used in this case is very complicated, so please introduce an input support function based on the following simplification rules and update the existing data?
They annoyingly only appear to use the album ID that appears at the end – you can change the rest of the path to be completely bogus, like /en/artist_bogus_123/item_bogus_11484396, and still get the same album page without any redirection to the canonical path.
One potential difference is that shortened Discogs URLs still look very similar to the full URLs, while the shortened HMV URLs are completely different apart from the shared IDs.
Ok, following the comment in the discussion thread introduced, this shortened URL is not actively annouced by HMV Japan, so I would drop this proposal. Thanks.
But the kind of short URL you showed is actually what HMV sends us in their new release notification emails (plus a trailing slash and some tracking query string):
For what it’s worth, my comment there was about the kind of change that does www.example.com/-/1234 (replacing the text with a required but empty fragment such as -). Your case seems to be the more straightforward dropping of sections entirely while keeping the ID, which we do fairly often.
