[mb-style] Billboard's "top whatever"

[Bogdan Butnaru]

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 — bogdanb at gmail.com
"I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.