Spotify seems to be a bit inconsistent in how it handles foreign language data.
For instance, I am having trouble with how to handle this album on MB: Japanese entry English entry
As you can see, it has (at least) two versions on Spotify. I don’t use Spotify much anymore, but when I did a year or so ago they used to have an option to toggle between album versions, but that seems to be gone now.
If I search for “剃刀乙女” in Japanese, only the transliterated version shows up, even though there clearly is another version available. If I change my language settings to Japanese, the same transliterated versions show up, which I’m sure is not the intended outcome.
To get to the real question: how should albums like this be handled in MB? The MB release group has two different Spotify versions, one with Japanese characters and one with Latin, but both with the artist name in Latin characters. If you look at the japanese release with your Spotify set to English, this is not wrong, but it doesn’t really make sense. Should the artist name generally be changed to the same writing system as the rest of the release in this case? I can’t imagine neither the artist nor whoever published the music on Spotify intended for this, but since I’m still relatively new to MB I’d love some second thoughts/confirmation.
They have different barcodes. It’s common that Spotify will have a Japanese release as well as a separate transliterated release.
More generally, Spotify enforces all kinds of arbitrary standardization that shouldn’t be copy-pasted into MusicBrainz. For example, they like replacing the “(instrumental)” suffix with " - Instrumental".
Yeah, I’ve never really trusted Spotify as a source, for this and other reasons. Thank you for the link, a decent part of the data I deal with is Japanese, so I’m sure it will be very useful!
Lastly, do you have any thought about how the artist name should be handled (last paragraph of the OP)?
As weird as it seems to be to use the transliterated name together with the Japanese title, I’d probably keep it that way in MB since the artist writes it that way on YouTube as well.
If inconsistencies bug me too much, I’ll sometimes enter a pseudo-release with the artist name and titles in the same language. Those are primarily useful for tagging, though so they’re less relevant for a Spotify release (and tagging software can theoretically use localized artist names instead if the artist entity has aliases with their locales set correctly).
Upon further inspection this is just inconsistent everywhere. Youtube Music and Deezer transliterate everything properly, while Spotify only transliterates the track titles based on your language settings. The craziest one is Apple Music, that has everything consistently in Japanese/Latin characters for Japanese/English language settings respectively, but for any other language setting only the artist name gets transliterated.
I think I’m just going to assume that the intention is for everything to be legible for whoever reads it in a specific language setting, so unless Spotify is the only digital release channel using the data from the most consistent one seems like the best approach.
Per Style, the Japanese release should therefore be using Japanese text. (Non-Japanese sources don’t apply.)
It’s not the case here, but in the event that there’s a single release with the same barcode, then the Official-status release should be using Japanese text, and the transliteration should be a Pseudo-release.
Thank you! It’s a little hard to wrap my head around digital releases sometimes—which ones are the same and which ones aren’t etc.—so I very much appreciate the help and links.
