Re: [mb-users] Are different digital downloads different releases?

Hello,

On 01/02/2013 12:24 PM, Frederic Da Vitoria wrote:
> 2013/1/2 RocknRollArchivist <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>>
>
>     Hello all,
>
>     I'm generally very skeptic about "digital releases" and especially about
>     their addition to Db.
>     A well-known artist which performs during a half of century (e.g.,
>     Jerry Lee
>     Lewis) has a thousands of recordings. Anyone who knows a little the
>     combinatorics can compute (or simply imagine) the number of possible
>     combinations from these thousands by 10, 12, 15, 20, etc. (not
>     billions, but
>     much more), and each one can be titled by anyone as a "digital release".
>     When we will add to them the number of possible combinations of
>     recordings
>     by Jerry Lee with the ones by other rock 'n' roll artists such as Elvis
>     Presley, Little Richard, Bill Haley, etc., we can imagine (not compute!)
>     this infinity of possible "digital rock 'n' roll compilations".
>     Do we need this infinity here in MB?
>
>
> I understand the numbers, although I believe you are slightly
> exaggerating them, but I agree that digital releases are probably going
> to be in much bigger numbers than physical releases. But I am not sure
> we have a choice: physical releases are probably going to disappear in a
> few years, already some artists release their albums digitally before
> doing it physically, some even do digital-only releases. So we can't
> simply say that we don't include digital releases, this would mean
> excluding entirely a growing part of all releases.

I don't understand the numbers as you both described them.

When a new album comes out, often with physical releases a CD has 
different barcodes and release dates in various countries.  For a new 
pop album I expect there to be at least a dozen different physical 
releases we could enter into musicbrainz.

Whereas with digital the releases in each region are usually the same. 
On occasion a UK version of an album on iTunes is different from the US 
version, but usually they're identical.  So, for digital releases we 
would have separate entries for iTunes, Amazon, Zune and 7digital but 
not for the UK iTunes, US iTunes, NL iTunes, because those are all 
perfectly identical.

There are only a few major online retailers, so I would think digital 
downloads reduces the amount of releases compared to physical.

(Again, I'm only saying that digital releases should be kept seperate 
when there are actual differences between them -- different cover art, 
or different audio, digital booklet included or not, stuff like that).

-- kuno / warp.