Hi. I’ve recently set out to reorganize my music collection with consistent tagging, but became interested in contributing more to the database aspect of MB. Most of the music I’ve added since joining has been Irish traditional music, and mostly commercially-available or formerly-available releases. I’ve read the style guidelines and I’m doing my best to fix up any initial submissions that may be inconsistent with them, but now I’m mostly done these “easy” entries and have some head-scratchers remaining, and don’t want to just wing it without some thoughts of more experienced members.
What I’m left with so far is:
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Digitized 78s, many from archive.org (ex., Touhey 78). These are mostly easy to release as singles, since many of the catalog numbers and labels are included; I wonder if I should consider the digitization online as a separate release, or just use the original shellac by itself?
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Academic and archive releases of old cylinders (ex. Busby-Carney collection, Henebry/O’Neill collection). An easier case is the Francis O’Neill cylinders, released as a CD (but also free on SoundCloud) by the Ward Music Archive. Many of these old cylinders were sold by the artist, but not commercially released in the conventional sense. These physical copies are unique with no additional physical copies as far as I’m aware; do they warrant release as singles, recordings, or should the archive playlist be considered the release? I’ll use Patsy Touhey again as an example:
By 1901 Touhey was running a unique mail-order service out of his home in New York. From a catalogue of 150 airs and dance tunes, it was possible to request cylinders custom-made for $1 each or $10 for twelve.
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Other archive releases. Some are based on field recordings or private home recordings (Ann Lane, Dr. O’Beirne recordings). Some of these may be considered bootlegs? Others are commissioned by the archive for their exhibits and released for free streaming (Ceol Goodman le Peter Browne).
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Misc. recordings released as informal albums. Sometimes come from shared tapes that have been passed around in the music community. Sometimes with, sometimes without artist involvement or awareness. My feeling is many can be categorized as bootlegs (example). These BBC recordings are another weird case. What about this informal cassette release of 78 recordings?
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Sometimes artists release an informal track list on SoundCloud from a live show at a small venue. I think these should be live album releases, is that correct?
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I’m also thinking of adding individual recordings for tracks released on YouTube, for performances at a festival for example, that aren’t available or released commercially. Or videos like this. Thoughts on these?
I think the genre-specific considerations of traditional music make many of these unusual recordings quite valuable from a historical perspective and thought that might be appropriate for this database. Thanks for any input!