[mb-style] RFC: Torrents as Releases (Was: Billboard's "top whatever")

[Don Redman]

On Tue, 01 Aug 2006 10:29:04 +0200, Chris Bransden wrote:

> define "popular" :) to quote myself: "how do you really measure
> that on the internet anyway? torrents are the only method of
> distribution [here], and aren't centralised anyway?" i just don't know
> how i would begin to decide which torrents were worthy and which were
> not.

That is why my proposal says: This will be decided on a case by case  
basis. I completely agree that we are not able to make a clear cut  
distinction between "popular" and "unpopular" now. However, I disagree  
that this is a good reason to ignore this phenomenon alltogether.  
Therefore I proposed the most pragmatic approach.

In practice anything of which
  * some people say: "yea, I know this one, I think it is popular"
  * noone says "sorry but this is really a minority thingie"
  * someone is willing to take care of the data in MB
can be considered "popular" in a first go.

Maybe some figures will help (how old is the torrent? Are there statistics  
on the user counts?). If we make some decisions they can serve as landmark  
cases for the rest and will eventually form a guideline.

Actually these criteria *are* derived from the concrete case of  
Billboard's Top n, which meets all of them.

> and also, why torrents? why not archives? playlists? lists found on
> sites? it goes on :/

Because my RFC is limited to torrents. Period. I try to stay focussed on  
the issue at hand. You are welcome to raise the issue for archives when  
someone wants to enter one.

   DonRedman

-- 
Words that are written in CamelCase refer to WikiDocs,
the MusicBrainz documentation system.
Go to http://musicbrainz.org/doc/<SomeTerm>
(you might need to transform the term to singular)