YouTube music releases: yay or nay?

[Jim_DeLaHunt]

@vacuousVersifier

There is this thread from 2017 that touches on the subject

See also

• Clarifying “Release” in a streaming world from 2016,
• Digital releases from 2018,
• Single tracks digital pre-releases from forthcoming albums from 2016.

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

@Jim_DeLaHunt

I’m comfortable saying that absolutely digital releases are a reality of the recorded music world, that MusicBrainz should deal with them, and that right now MusicBrainz handles them inadequately. However, I think making MusicBrainz handle them well is not a question of desire, it’s a question of successfully doing difficult design and implementation work while still keeping the existing MusicBrainz running.…

What do I mean by digital releases? The biggest gap for MusicBrainz are released recordings that are a) not a corollary of a release on a physical medium, and b) streamed, rather than fixed as static data, and c) single recordings rather than a group of related “tracks” that are part of an “album”.…

The economics and technology limitations of physical LP and CD product distribution meant that a release had many mostly-identical copies. But distribution by streaming is different: no “copy” remains as static data under normal use, so there is no comparing. And distribution by static music file still allows the distributor to put a customer ID in the file, meaning every copy of the music file could be different.

If you stand back and squint, the MusicBrainz “Release” entity is heavily tied to the physical LP and CD conceptual model. Handling digital releases properly will require a different structure, perhaps a new entity parallel to “Release”. I expect that that design and implementation will be tricky. However, “Artist” and “Recording” and “Work” entities are just as effective for digital releases as for they are for the physical LP and CD concept. So we don’t have to rebuild all of MusicBrainz.