Why are things like this?

MusicBrainz
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There are numerous posts about details about this, to the point that it’s hard to get a clear answer.

Why, in MB, are there modifications (ostensible “corrections”) to band, track, album, etc names?

I’m aware of standard punctuation/capitalization rules, keyboard differences between regions, and so on, but given that every single name mentioned is a proper name, if not a stylized name, why is there any deviation from what the bands/labels themselves publish?

I run across these on the regular, but just one example:

”Days N’ Daze”. For some reason, in MB and MB alone, their name shows up with “Days N’ Daze” (with a right quotation mark instead of single-quote).
I mention this one specifically because I know these folks, I’ve known the band for many years, and despite a single-quote showing up on Discogs, Wikipedia, etc - there’s actually no quote mark at all, and certainly not a keyboard-obscure right-quote. Yet, here it is in the MB XML data:

<artist>Days N’ Daze</artist>

So why is it there at all?

Related: MB data using “proper” title capitalization on track/album/band names where it’s not used on the source records, switching out keyboard-friendly hyphens for em/en dashes that the source artists almost certainly did not use themselves, and so on.

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Huh. I looked a the cover art for some of their early releases, and all of them have a quote mark. Not only that, but a pretty curvy one too! :slight_smile:

More generally, we use the character that is supposed to be correct to represent what is represented, unless we know that the artist specifically chose to use the "keyboard-friendly” variant despite knowing it’s not the correct representation of the character. That happens in some cases, and in that case we defer to the intention of the artist. In most cases, they just either do not know or do not care about the difference, but we like things being as correct as possible, so we do. The same is true for the capitalization: if we know that the artist intentionally uses a specific style of caps because that’s an artistic decision, we keep it (that’s why we generally wouldn’t correct a consistently all-lowercase or ALL-UPPERCASE title).

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That “right quotation mark” is also an apostrophe in the world of Unicode and perfect punctuation. It gets a bit mad with the half dozen different hypens\dashes:

As an old punk I came here and got confused with all this mess. So I just add a script to my tagging tool and strip them out for my own use.

This place is a database. Run like an encyclopaedia. The punctuation gets “fixed” by teams of people who spend their days adjusting the text to fix standard accepted guides. This is how people get taught to write at college or for newspapers and formal articles.

Look at what happens when you use this Discord forum - you can write something “in quotes” and watch as the keyboard typed quote’s and apostrophe’s get changed to Unicode standard compliant stuff’s. Same as when you type in Word or any word processor. This isn’t just a MusicBrainz thing.

It is the land of the printing press. It is why the album covers also see the curly apostrophe appear. The artistic world likes being arty.

Same applies to Title Case Being Used for the Titles. There is a logic so some of this madness. :smiley:

And yet the rest of us are happy with a tatty old keyboard.

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I’m not sure what you’re looking at, but they do not. The N is usually stylized to the squatter rights symbol, there’s no quote.

On their labels, there’s either no quote or a single quote, occasionally

But regardless, this is purely an example.

This is what concerns me:

supposed to be correct to represent what is represented

Correct based on what? Using this band again, what’s “correct” for representing the squatter rights symbol? It seems like the pattern is not to use the predominant, or simply verbatim presentation of some of these names, but to make corrections based on language or punctuation mechanics.

The problem really arises with computers consuming this data - a human viewer doesn’t much care or possibly even notice a single quote vs a right quote, nor a hyphen from an em dash, but one character or case difference for a computer and one has duplicates, mismatches, and so on. Which makes any correction from a predominant or canonical version just an odd choice, to me.

I may just be yelling into the void here, but I’m just trying to get my head around the patterns in the data.

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Like @reosarevok , I looked at the cover art for some of the Days N Daze releases in the database:

So, maybe the group makes a practice of not including apostrophes after N now. Maybe they weren’t meticulous about that in cover art design 18 years ago. We should follow Artist Intent. We have ways to represent Artist names which change over time, using Aliases and their date fields.

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Agreed ! When it is not possible for any keyboard outside of Microsoft Office Word (that changes the ’ and " depending of the language used), I do not think it is wise to used “extremely specific characters” in latin written languages that do not have a way to type it natively (I precise because of some language in Eastern Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia that are written with latin scripts with many diacritics/special characters, but their keyboard is adapted to this end).

For me, until there is a site-wide script/mechanism/tool to transform easily " ’ " to " ’ " or automatic “similarity” between the 2 symbols, I don’t know if it should be a rule of English punctiation. My take.

Especially in the post-Harmony musicbrainz era we live in, where no Streaming platform follow these rules.

Yeah for Days N Date it might not apply but I saw the issue popping from time to times so.

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There’s a lot of variation here. While I completely agree that typing these characters is less easy for the vast majority of the users you’re talking about, it’s definitely possible for some. On-screen keyboards (common on phones, less common but still an option elsewhere) sometimes have long-press or right-click as a way to get variations on a punctuation mark. I think macOS has a way to long-hold a physical keyboard key for something similar, but I don’t know what the options there are. Some people use input method engines to modify the effect of a physical keyboard, e.g., I can press Alt-\Z'q and my input method will change that to ’.

Picard has “Convert Unicode punctuation characters to ASCII”: Metadata Options — MusicBrainz Picard v2.6.4 documentation

Is there somewhere else that’s missing that option?

MusicBrainz has a lot more than just streaming music. Though I definitely think there are places where it makes sense to treat streaming specially, and maybe this is one.

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Days N’ Days would be short for Days and Days. So, the apostrophe (not quote) is used as an abbreviation. Early releases showed this. Wikipedia STILL shows it as Days N’ Days as well, so it’s not MB and MB alone as you state. Notice that even though capitalization rules state it should be Days n’ Days, that it’s capitalized based on apparent artist intent for the N to be capitalized. If they no longer have the apostrophe in their name, the main artist name could be changed to reflect this. However, the releases that have the apostrophe should stay that way to show how it was credited on those releases.

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The common version that includes any quote has a single quote (Wikipedia, etc), not the right quote character that MB has as the primary listing. I mentioned that in the first post.

There is one solitary release from 2008 that @Jim_DeLaHunt noticed that plausibly has the right quote on the album cover, but that’s it. This was all covered pretty thoroughly in the thread, as was this release merely being an example of the data “choosing” the less common, less predominant versions of any given name, hence my question.

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That’s not a “right quote” that is a proper apostrophe. We use proper punctuation, not ASCII equivalents. As I stated, if you think that there should be no apostrophe at all, you can put an edit for the main artist.

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This is why MusicBrainz encourages editors to use the correct typography/symbols, unless is evidence of artist intent to the contrary*.

Because it is easy for computers to replace all different apostrophe types with a single unicode character. But very hard and sometimes impossible for computers to figure out the correct apostrophe based on text context and artist intent.

For instance you can easily force unicode punctuation in MusicBrainz Picard tags by checking a box. It is much more difficult (if not impossible) to enable someone to check a box to make punctuation ‘technically correct’ in all cases.

*if artist intent isn’t being followed then it should be corrected

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100% agree, none of this was about how to “fix” that one entry, it’s already done for me. It was wondering why it was like that to begin with.

I do go back to the idea of “correct” though, and I think that’s part of the answer. There is no “correct” here, it’s a name. But, absent other context, an editor probably defaulted to language correctness (likely the same thing I’ve seen repeatedly). This seems really obvious as we discuss it, but it feels like it’s been less consistent than that - but it seems like a clear sentiment here, and that makes sense.

The OP could just stop yapping and submit a fix :wink:

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To a person, it may be an apostrophe, but this is not English class. To a computer It is very literally the right quotation mark, ascii character 146.

I appreciate your point, but proper punctuation isn’t relevant in stylized proper names - though you may have inadvertently answered my original question.

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ASCII doesn’t go above 127, and your link is to Windows-1252, which is obsolete.

In modern computer systems, the character is U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK in Unicode. I think Chapter 6 – Unicode 17.0.0 is the right reference for its usage as an apostrophe:

U+0027 ’ APOSTROPHE is the most commonly used character for apostrophe. For historical reasons, U+0027 is a particularly overloaded character. In ASCII, it is used to represent a punctuation mark (such as right single quotation mark, left single quotation mark, apostrophe punctuation, vertical line, or prime) or a modifier letter (such as apostrophe modifier or acute accent). Punctuation marks generally break words; modifier letters generally are considered part of a word.

When text is set, U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred as apostrophe, …

I’d honestly recommend looking at the Unicode standard itself whenever trying to understand what a specific Unicode code point (character-ish) actually means.

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Thanks for the pointer to U+2019 : RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.

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Always happy to try to convince people to read the Unicode spec rather than all the websites of widely-varying quality that show details about specific characters :smiley:

(Seriously, I wish the Unicode spec’s license made it easier for the more user-friendly websites to show more accurate information.)

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“what did you do today honey?”

“had a cup of coffee and then mentioned an apostrophe on the MusicBrainz forums”

“and then?”

“I just told you”

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This is likely part of the puzzle for people who aren’t developer’s and\or aren’t writing book’s, theses’s and other places when the standard’s are used.

I’m checking my apostrophe’s bingo card here and no one has yet brought in the links’ to the Posh University writing guides yet. So we are missing on the UK vs US standard’s tangents.

It always make’s me laugh that the apostrophe’s ‘n’ dash’es debate held in a Discourse forum has the forum tools changing the type’d words to the prettified one’s that “no one uses” :joy:. It happens all the time but no one notices.

Many editors here are just into the music, and this all is a confusing madness of rule’s that take’s a while for some of us to get our head around. Importantly we can ignore it and just type normally. No one is forcing us to type odd characters as other people who care always come along and fix them. Both system’s are allowed, just one is preferre’d.

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“no one” lol that’s me. (And I’m guessing a bunch of other people here too.)

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I notice and it annoys the heck out of me when people use the wrong one