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BuriedUnborn
Metal newbie

Joined: Wed Jul 26, 2017 12:01 pm
Posts: 318
Location: Inside your house
PostPosted: Tue Apr 12, 2022 4:22 am 
 

Now that the site has been accepting streaming-only releases on platforms such as Spotify, I've been noticing that it can become rather hard to distinguish between these releases and purchasable/downloadable digital releases such as those you find on Bandcamp.

While the "version description" field can work to distinguish different digital releases based on their platform, not all users use it to describe the platform the release is on, and nowadays most artists put their music on multiple services, and creating an entry for each platform is just not sensible. These streaming-only releases can also be confusing in different scenarios and contexts, in which maybe the Spotify and Apple Music versions of a same album could be different, or have come out at different points in time, or Bandcamp releases with download-only bonus tracks are considered to be the same release as the ones in streaming platforms. It's also misleading that users can possibly add streaming-only releases to their collection.

Because of these multiple reasons and just the technical differences between streaming-only and donwloadable digital releases, I'd like to discuss a solution to separate these two into different categories within the site, as to make it easier to distinguish, prevent misleading abuses of the collection system, and also make the site a bit more polished.

So, my personal suggestion would be to add a checkbox for digital releases to flag them as "streaming-only", which would block these versions from being added to users' personal collections, and easily distinguish them from downloadable releases without having to recur to version descriptions.

There would definitely be a lot of work to be done, and it'd probably be necessary to separate a lot of Bandcamp and Spotify releases sharing the same version because they're both digital, but I honestly think this is going to be good in the long run and make it less confusing to distinguish the types of digital releases.
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14222
Metal newbie

Joined: Fri Feb 28, 2014 6:50 pm
Posts: 46
PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2022 5:53 pm 
 

I've noticed this confusion too regarding digital releases.
Would be nice to have different panels named like music platforms to flag that appear in the editing section of a release when you choose the digital format (as happens with "RPM" and "(size)" when you choose Vinyl or "Same songs on each side" and "No B side" when you choose tape). With this option would be also not necessary to specify if it's a download or streaming-only release since it will be obvious by the flagged platforms.

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Kennermahn
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Jan 04, 2019 1:36 am
Posts: 616
PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2022 7:54 pm 
 

It must be noted that streaming-only releases are in fact a rarity and the vast majority of times you see a release with Spotify in the description it's just a case of the person who added it being lazy and not bothering to check that the release could in fact be purchased and downloaded on other digital platforms, such as Amazon and Apple Music, as well as others.

BuriedUnborn wrote:
So, my personal suggestion would be to add a checkbox for digital releases to flag them as "streaming-only", which would block these versions from being added to users' personal collections, and easily distinguish them from downloadable releases without having to recur to version descriptions.


This makes sense although this would lead to many releases being falsely labeled as "streaming-only" when they can be in fact be purchased and downloaded on other platforms (just not on Bandcamp), as per what I just said.

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Kennermahn
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Jan 04, 2019 1:36 am
Posts: 616
PostPosted: Sat May 21, 2022 5:07 am 
 

A quick search for albums with Spotify in the description
https://www.metal-archives.com/search/a ... re=#albums
Revealed a few invalid singles (with the same cover as the album that'd contain them) and plenty of releases which were released on other platforms (where they could be purchased and downloaded) of course. Some releases cannot be verified because they don't seem to be available anymore.

The takeaway from this is that a streaming-only checkbox would lead to plenty of releases being falsely labeled as such because of lazy editors. In fact, if I were to suggest something to the administration it would be to post something telling people to always verify before assuming that a release is Spotify only to avoid that being added to the version description.

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