On 26/07/06, Bogdan Butnaru <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I start this thread because of (1) and to a related thread on the
user's list. I started it here because I think this is a guideline
issue and we need to discuss as such. I encountered similar
situations before.
(1) http://musicbrainz.org/show/edit/?editid=5258089
The current guidelines say rather flatly that homebrews are
discouraged. I think we should at least change that formula to an
explicitly more flexible version. Perhaps even add an "internet
bootleg release" rule, separately.
I stated this in a (less organized) note on the edit above: homebrews
and most torrents are random collections of songs of no musical
interest except to a very small number of people, and for a short
time.
But that doesn't mean all home-burnt CDs and music .torrents are
uninteresting for MB. We do keep in the database demo tapes that were
released by some obscure band thirty years ago, when they were even
more obscure, in 200 copies, on tapes, recorded in their basements.
And we (at least I) care for them and consider them important (or at
least interesting) pieces of discographic history.
How can we then look at a collection of all the songs in one of
Billboard's (*) tops and dismiss it as a "homebrew" just because it
was not released on a physical bootleg CD from Russia(**), but
through a torrent? I have seen almost-one-year-old torrents of such
collections that still had 500+ downloaders. Not to mention that it
is, in fact, a collection of the best-sold music of the times, which
is not a very arbitrary criterion.
but where's the line between arbitrary and non-arbitrary? where's the
line between popular and non-popular (and how do you really measure
that on the internet anyway? torrents are the only method of
distribution, and aren't centralised anyway)? surely any criteria is
worthy of indexing if it's popular, and if, say, one were to compile a
torrent of the top 100 of 1978 in iceland it would be as non-arbitrary
as the case above.
IMO you can't make rules about this sort of thing, so it's best to say
"everything goes" (freedb...) or "only these concrete cases" (current
system).
Such a collection is, I insist, worthy of MusicBrainz, both as a
tagging database and as a discographic database. (In fact, I'd even
agree with adding at least some of Billboard's tops even if there was
not, in fact, a torrent containing the songs.)
you'd index a criteria of music, despite this not neccesarily being
released in any form?!
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