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 wouldnāt add them under the same release group at all - the two arenāt equivalent in any way. My general choice, if they arenāt 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 thatās probably not everyoneās preference.
Exactly.
Up to now Iāve been putting them as āSinglesā but obviously not always the case. Iām referring to Brian Enoās recent single-track release of āThe Seaā which is a preview from the upcoming album. Itās available on Spotify only for the moment, so not commercially available for download as such.
Should we have a āstreamingā release medium option?
As you say, it shouldnāt share a release group with the full album. Iāve seen the āOtherā release group type used for these kinds of release groups, but the single type might do.
A relevant question is āIs this a release?ā. This has been discussed before, see the topic āClarifying āReleaseā in a streaming worldā (including my personal stance). For reference, Iāll also link my old topic āAlbum 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 hadnāt 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 āhistoryā 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 āsingleā. 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 wouldnāt necessarily consider it a āreleaseā.
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