Single tracks digital pre-releases from forthcoming albums

How do we deal with tracks from albums which are made available when pre-ordering an album, but not necessarily singles?

They obviously have different release dates to the official album so should be treated as separate releases.

Single track under album release group?

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If adding a separate release, I wouldnā€™t add them under the same release group at all - the two arenā€™t equivalent in any way. My general choice, if they arenā€™t single-ish enough to get their own release, would be to just disregard the earlier release date and simply have them as part of the album, but I understand thatā€™s probably not everyoneā€™s preference.

Exactly.

Up to now Iā€™ve been putting them as ā€˜Singlesā€™ but obviously not always the case. Iā€™m referring to Brian Enoā€™s recent single-track release of ā€˜The Seaā€™ which is a preview from the upcoming album. Itā€™s available on Spotify only for the moment, so not commercially available for download as such.

Should we have a ā€˜streamingā€™ release medium option?

As you say, it shouldnā€™t share a release group with the full album. Iā€™ve seen the ā€œOtherā€ release group type used for these kinds of release groups, but the single type might do.

A relevant question is ā€œIs this a release?ā€. This has been discussed before, see the topic ā€œClarifying ā€œReleaseā€ in a streaming worldā€ (including my personal stance). For reference, Iā€™ll also link my old topic ā€œAlbum tracks released as singlesā€ from the old forums which seems to handle a similar issue.

Thanks for your replies and links to other threads which I hadnā€™t seen.

I think at the end of the day including album pre-release single track downloads or streaming previews under the release group for the relative album might be the best idea. <My opinion!> That way at least we get an idea of the ā€˜historyā€™ of the release itself, ie. seeing that a certian track or tracks were released prior to the full release.

This would be the case if the track is not to be considered a ā€˜singleā€™. We are obviously talking about digital download/streaming tracks only here of course.

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Personally for one track I would just add a stand-alone recording, and add a note that that the track was available as a preview track before the album was released (with the date and relevant info so we have that history available).
I wouldnā€™t necessarily consider it a ā€˜releaseā€™.

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