Suggestion: combine and synchronise genre tags between all releases

MusicBrainz
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On the page of a release, you will often (usually) not see any genre tags for that release.

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Only when you navigate to the releasegroup you can see if/what genres it is tagged with:

There are two issues with that that I can see:

  • You will miss out on possibly useful and interesting information.

  • It does not help in making users aware or enthusiastic about improving on the genre database.

In hindsight, for me it has even been one of the main reasons I always thought MusicBrainz was not very interested in- or suited for managing genres.
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While I can understand that ‘other tags’ probably should be unique for a release vs. shared over the whole release group, I see no good reasons why the genre tag should be.

Currently you can have it that the exact same album will show ‘soul’ for one release, ‘blues’ for a second, ‘jazz’ for a third, and no genre tag at all for the others.
That doesn’t make much sense to me, and it isn’t useful.

My proposal is that the validated genre tags get shared and synchronised between the release group and all it’s containing releases, and that they all get displayed on both the release page and the release group page.

That will both be an improvement on presenting all available genre information, and it very likely be a big boost to raise awareness on genres and get more users contributing and improving on it.

7 Likes
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i’ve had this thought before and appreciate/second you putting it into action!! i’m fairly new here but i see little possible downside other than maybe clutter?

2 Likes
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Interesting question, will different releases in a release group ever have different genre tags set? Presumably if it goes so far as to have a genre change it would be a new release group (e.g. remix). Perhaps bonus tracks could be of a different genre?

If genre shouldn’t really change in a release group then the genre tags really should/could be duplicated across all releases and the release group. (@reosarevok?)

I’ve made a ticket anyway: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-11634

1 Like
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If I remember correctly RYM has releases inherit the release group genres but you can change the genres on an individual release in case there are bonus tracks/a bonus CD. So if a pop album has a deluxe edition with an ambient remix disc you could add an ambient tag to that release while still using the release group genres.

2 Likes
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So only pull the tags from the release group into the sub-releases, but not the other way around, or between releases?

A definite improvement. If @hiccup’s experience is that release groups are usually tagged it might solve the issue, rather than merging everything. RYM does sometimes have genre buried in individual releases though and I wonder if that would happen here too.