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

On 8 January 2013 21:08, Jazzy Jarilith <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've too added digital releases into the database, and only because it was
> allowed: I don't believe we should treat them as regular releases. Digital
> media is more like a new form of broadcasting than anything else. You do not
> own the music you "buy" on i-Tunes or Amazon. It's just another way to
> stream music as you would on Spotify or Deezer (On a related note, some
> bands make their music available for streaming ONLY, no CDs, no download.
> Streaming only), with the only difference being that you can do it off-line.

That may have been true in the early days when digital music had Digital Rights
Management (DRM) but now you download a file and can copy it to pretty much
anywhere.  That is not the same as "streaming" [*]

> Should we then add a separate entry for each of them? My first thought would
> be to say no. But then what of the release dates? A given album might be
> released at different times on different services. This would be in favor of
> adding separate entries for each digital stores/streaming platforms.
> And heres comes up another problem: how do you find out the release date?
> Example:
> https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/abbey-road/id401186200
> Was this ever released on i-tunes in 1969? Definitely not. Not to mention
> that this version is yet another remaster...
> I foresee lots of headaches in the future. ;-)

I don't think there should be separate releases for different stores.
That would be
like adding the copy sold at each record store.  If the track listing
& lengths are the
same, I think you can pretty much assume it's the same release, working from the
record company's point of view.  That's always the view we've worked
from before,
rather than the store.  I doubt many people bought CD copies from two
physical stores
and compared them either.

At the moment, it is necessary to handle different release dates in
different countries,
but this is also a problem for other media.  I'd like to see MB move
back to having
country/release date as an artefact of each release as we've discussed
on the bug
database before, so we don't have duplicate releases where the only
difference is
the release date & country (label, artwork, etc. are the same).

The iTunes release of Abbey Road will be the 2009 remaster for which
there are physical
copies.  Why someone would want a remastered version from iTunes where
it's been compressed
and is now of worse quality than the original 1987 CD versions, one
can only wonder...
Convenience I guess.  Apple do have a loseless format but I've never
seen it used in the
store.  Why assume the users have intelligence?

>
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--
Andii :-)