YouTube music releases: yay or nay?

MusicBrainz
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I’ve spent the last handful of hours trying to find some documentation or discussion on how music released on YouTube should fit into MusicBrainz.

There is this thread from 2017 that touches on the subject but I have a feeling things may have changed since then!

Most voices seem to say that anything released on YouTube should be entered as stand-alone recordings. The common explanation (I believe) is that you cannot release albums on YouTube, only playlists. Recently it seems YouTube has added a way to mark playlists as albums/singles? See https://www.youtube.com/@[musical artist name here]/releases

Underneath it still looks like a playlist, however. I’m not sure if artists are able to modify them after the fact, which would make it harder to claim they are proper releases. Although, this seems to be a bigger problem with digital releases in general.

Some artists only ever release their work on YouTube, as has been mentioned in previous threads, so being able to enter information about those works into MusicBrainz is important (I listen to a lot of music only released on YouTube, so being able to tag those properly is esp. important to me specifically, but I’m sure I’m not the only one!)

Standalone recordings are fine but there is so much information that can’t be entered into just a recording without a release. Information like language or annotations. Further, if a video contains multiple songs (such as when an album is just released as one big video), there’s no way to convey that via standalone recordings except with clunky relationships that is pale in comparison to regular media/releases.

This is more of a UI note, but if an artist only releases on YouTube, then their artist page here will look rather barren unless one navigates to the recording page. If you want to find out what ‘albums’ they have released you would have to piece it together over the entire list of recordings.

There are many types of music that tend to stick just on YouTube. Important to me are songs (esp. covers) in Toki Pona. Entire swathes of music catalogues are just available on YouTube. Perhaps they are not properly released, but people do listen to these tracks!

In my humble opinion, a more integrated way to show these releases would be a great boon. To quote aerozol from that 2017 thread:

But maybe I am off my rocker! I greatly want to hear from those more experienced with the database. There are a lot of songs I would love to add to MBZ but would hate to enter them incorrectly, in addition to the myriad songs already added that could use some systematization.

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PS: There is this MBZ wiki article describing how to enter Stand-alones and mentions YouTube. It’s not reviewed but it’s just about the only thing that specifically discusses YouTube. So!

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Almost all digital releases that are on Spotify/Deezer, etc. are also on YouTube. You most certainly can have releases on YouTube. Yes, the URL’s have “playlist” in the URL, but they are in fact releases. You can search them on YouTube Music by barcode actually (only Music, not regular YouTube), if you know the barcode from Spotify/Apple/Deezer, etc. This will give you the result of the release. You still need to be careful because sometimes it might give you the standard when you are looking for the deluxe, but you can still see the releases. All you have to do to find the regular YouTube release is just replace “music” with “www” in the URL. So, all music.youtube.com releases are www.youtube.com. As far as standalone videos that are just music uploaded by a user and doesn’t appear anywhere else, that still be should be entered as standalones as you describe.

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music releases on YouTube are in fact releases now, and also I’ve seen still-image videos added as releases as well (these are usually treated the same as YouTube Music™ releases, as @tigerman325 mentions above, being entered the same as audio releases)

I believe the Releases tab comes from YouTube Music™, which is YouTube’s music streaming outgrowth (and has to be distributed to like Spotify, Deezer, TIDAL, etc.). I don’t see a way to add it on my personal YouTube channel

we’re currently working through the guidelines on what music video releases’ place is in the database, if you’re interested

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See also

In particular I’d like to point people to what I wrote in one reply to the latter topic:

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There is quite a lot of talk about Music Videos, and I do think that conversation is important but I’m talking about something else here.

I think a large crux of the issue is a sense of legitimacy. I believe I tend to be a release-radical: if it is possible for basically anyone to get ahold of a song or album, it should be a release because that means people are (at least able to be) listening to it.

As an example: kalama musi pi jan sewi meli by astrodonut. I can see why most would not consider it a release. It is effectively someone who sat down and sung some chants, recorded it, and put it on YouTube. It barely has a name (that title basically just means goddess chants). The “cover art” is simply black because the video has no content. Yet, it is a song released to the public for people to listen to.

To me, it seems a bit silly for this to be a legitimate release, it must have been published on any other streaming service (like bandcamp or even soundcloud). I understand from a “this is a system designed with physical releases in mind” perspective. However, I just don’t think it can properly adapt to how music spreads today!

But this is mostly just some musing! As @UltimateRiff said:

YouTube releases are indeed being entered into the system. Thanks for that thread by the way, wonderful read. It seems in the end the largest decider is on a case-by-case basis. For artists like astrodonut, I think adding YouTube releases as releases proper is appropriate (they do not release music elsewhere).

One point of style that would need to be determined: Being the free-form nature of YouTube, songs can be released with……. weird video structures. First and foremost is title. To use another astrodonut example: Stronger Than You cover in Toki Pona - wawa kin. How would you enter that into MusicBrainz at all? My instinct would to call it “wawa kin” with perhaps the “Stronger Than You cover” in the disambiguation? Artist intent gets fuzzy when dealing with YouTube releases.

Another problem is track length. For an example that I entered into MBZ when I was a wee editor (even more than right now) was Endless Climb by The Mock. In the YouTube video, there is the main song, a brief talking section, and then an untitled track. Should track length be deduced by the person entering the track? Should the talking section be notated (I am not sure if convention for that already exists)?

Even worse is HOMESTUCK COVERS FINALE!!! by the same artist. That has a lengthy intro before revealing the video is a prank before the “real” song begins. This faces the length issue and the naming issue (There is a “logical” title to give to the song, Harlequin, but that’s a big decision!).

If any of these songs were released properly we would have canonical names and lengths to go by, but alas.

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By “legitimacy”, do you mean, has passed through commercial distribution gates guarded by record labels and has been mass-manufactured and is an object of commerce? Because I think that is the mindset underlying the design of MusicBrainz.

But the world has changed. Barriers to entry have dropped. Someone can make a recording, put it on Youtube, bypass the gatekeepers and the CD-pressing factory, and deliver copies of their music to an audience. By the terms of the MusicBrainz goals, that recording is in scope for MusicBrainz. So, let’s figure out how to handle it.

Let’s start by not overthinking the simple data items like Title and Duration:

It seems to me that the title of that Release is in big letters on the Youtube page: “Stronger Than You cover in Toki Pona - wawa kin”. The artist typed that name into the Youtube upload page. That what they intend the title to be.

Youtube says that the Release is 4:51 long. Easy.

Sure, the Release does not fit the commercial (saleable) model of 3-5 minute song separated by 2-second gaps, with no artist commentary; but this is the platform with no barrier to entry. The Artist can include a mixture of content in their Release if they want.

Have you thought about what Relationships you would apply to Relases like this? Maybe create Work entries for “wawa kin” and “Stronger than you”, and use Relationships to link them to the Release? That way you can express more about this Release without having to cram into and change the Release title.

MusicBrainz is more than the single line of text which is the Title of the Release.

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By “legitimacy” I mean whatever metric anyone uses to judge whether or not something should be entered as a release. It does seem that most editors use the metric you describe.

I think this would be a reasonable standard. I do not think it is quite adequate: YouTube titles are for videos not the music, necessarily! Plenty of times it is and I think the default would be to treat it as such.

Would this carry over for the recording name? Sometimes (esp. in albums or EPs) chapter titles are used for each track, but that is hit-or-miss. I would say the default should just to copy the title of the release/release group (that being, the title of the YouTube video).

The release length is 4:51, yes. I am speaking about the recordings themself :slight_smile:

That approach wouldn’t work for the “HOMESTUCK COVERS FINALE!!!” example as there are indeed two tracks in one video.

I would perhaps support another special use title akin to [untitled]. Searching through existing recordings I see that titles such as [ talking ], [ tuning ], [ instrumental ], etc. None of them are official but I think something like [commentary] being a part of the style guide would be very useful.

How true! However, the title of the release is one of the key fields added when not just entering these songs as recordings :slight_smile:

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It sounds like you want to catalogue only the audio part of the Youtube video. But the Release is a video, and we should catalogue it as such. It has an audio part, and a visual part. The audio part might be some music and some non-music. Nevertheless, the Youtube video is what was released, and that is what so we should catalogue as the Release. In my humble opinion.

What I see here is a Youtube video Release with one track. The track consists of some titles over silence, some music, then some commentary. I think it is interesting that you are looking to catalogue subsections within that track. It is not clear to me that this is the best way to apply the MusicBrainz Release structure to this Youtube video release.

The alternative is to catalogue this Youtube video as a Release with a single Track which is the length of the video. Then come up with a new MusicBrainz structure to catalogue parts of a track as separate entries. This could be useful in audio recordings, for instance of live recordings of medleys, where one Track on a CD consists of multiple songs played in sequence.

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I personally always use the video title for the track title (and therefore the recording title too) unless the video has chapters like this one:

a good example of how I handle titles is this fan-made music video

the original video title is 100 gecs - stupid horse (FAN ANIMATION), which contains the music artist 100 gecs, so I put that in the track artist and recording artist field (tho I left the video creator as the release artist, at least for now)

I generally leave most of the rest of the video title in the release/track title tho, unless it’s specifically called out in the ETI docs or maybe if there’s something that specifically belongs in a different field, like an artist, label, or something similar

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Oh my goodness I am absolutely embarrassed I was talking about the wrong release in that collection. I was talking about Endless Climb.

Hmm, very good point. On YouTube you cannot just upload audio it has to have some visual component. I’ve been ignoring the video aspect to be able to treat them as singles and albums.

Hmm, interesting idea.

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since there’s no chapters, I would probably still enter that as a single-track video release, just attach the two works to the same track

this could be a case where standalone recordings could help? I don’t know if there’s really anything that says you can’t do this (tho I don’t know that I’d recommend it either, it’s just a possibility)

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I mean, this release was released before chapters were a thing. Further, if chapters do count in being able to separate recordings, surely a similar artist-intention argument can be made for this example.

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A bit late, but it’s a big “yay” from me!

And other MB editors will say “yay” as well, in my experience, so I think you can go for it and all the music. The only thing you have to be careful about, imo, is adding things that are only tenuously “music” related. I think the only thing that is debatable is how exactly to add YouTube releases, but other threads discuss that in detail.

Yup!

imo, not necessarily. Recording names are meant to be more canonical, while releases reflect the intent behind the specific release.

For example, for release titles/tracks I would stick with whatever ‘creative’ name the uploader has used, just removing ‘descriptive’ information, like language, “cover of…”, that kind of thing (this is a MB guideline for physical tracklists as well). For the recording I would possibly aim for a more canonical/simpler name e.g. if the recording was released multiple times with different names they would all link to the same ‘canonical’ recording. But in practice, unless the recording was actually used in multiple releases it’s easier and quicker to just use the same name as the release and I would probably just do that.

Cool to see you adding lots of YT stuff btw! With relationships etc. I’m not that old (I think??) but it’s already another world for me :grinning_face:

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