http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_charts#Methodology_of_its_charts
As you can see, the Billboard system changes, it calculates radio airplay and music bought at SoundScan-enabled stores. So this is a bit arbitrary (and much in favor of "commercial" releases). As you can see there are many different "charts", and that is only the Billboard charts. What about the charts in Tanzania, Tuvalu or Turkmenistan? Should they be omitted? Sandor (Nine99/darkshyne) Bogdan Butnaru 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. > > (* a rather prestigious publication, I gather; unfortunately geography > prevented me from hearing of it before today, but I have seen several > books on Amazon and numerous Wikipedia entries on the subject.) > (** sorry for the stereotype, but it helps my point.) > > 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. > > * * * * * * > > OK, this is getting long, and here it's getting late. I'll stop here > and wait some more comments before continuing. > > -- Bogdan Butnaru — [EMAIL PROTECTED] > "I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O. -- Echte DSL-Flatrate dauerhaft für 0,- Euro*. Nur noch kurze Zeit! "Feel free" mit GMX DSL: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl _______________________________________________ Musicbrainz-style mailing list Musicbrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
