On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 01:43:05AM +0200, Bogdan Butnaru wrote: > 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.
So are you for adding: Billboard's Top 1000 Singles 1955-2000 ASIN: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0634020021 Billboard's Top 1000 Singles 1955-1987 ASIN: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881889636 Billboard's Top 1000 Singles 1955-1992 ASIN: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0793573629 Billboard's Top 1000 Hits of the Rock Era 1955-2005 ASIN: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1423409191 Billboard's Top Pop Singles 1955-2002 ASIN: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0898201551 Etc etc etc... The problem is that there are 779 matches for books with "Billboard Top" as the search term at Amazon. That is, for some pieces, hundreds of PUID collisions. "Oh, you have a copy of Roy Orbison's :Crying:? Guess which of the hundreds of releases it is on..." Even with 1000 tracks, which 1000 tracks is it? The 1987 list? 1992? 2000? 2005? Is it the Pop Singles or just Singles? Or maybe it is "Hits"... > 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.) I think we should make > this part of the guidelines. Of course, since the list by Billboard Magazine is not technically pure facts: they are not the "best selling hits," (though certainly most are... they are not listed in the order of sales, but in the order that some editor believes is important), it is questionable legally if recording the list would be a violation of Billboard's copyright. You can't copyright a collection of facts in an obvious order: but you -can- copyright a collection of facts in a creative order, which is exactly what Billboard has done with most of these (in these days of whatever-it-is-that-comes-after "double-platinum," there would be no songs from the 50's represented if it was merely based on units sold). I would bet Billboard Magazine would not be thrilled to see the books that they publish listed all over the place. Billboard -does- have audio cd's which would qualify for here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000033KZ for example (50 tracks on 5 CD's) or http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000033KO (also 50 tracks on 5 CD's) and 148 others matching at Amazon... Those I would have no problem with. I -would- have a problem if someone took one of those 5 CD sets, removed the TPOS or '(disc 1)' or DISCNUMBER or whatever you want to call it, and just numbered the tracks 1 to 50 and pretended it was a real release. I bet you would have a problem with that too. How is this "Top 100" any different? And if "Top 100" is okay, is "Top 1000" okay too? _______________________________________________ Musicbrainz-style mailing list Musicbrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
