Internet Releases

What's the best way to title Internet-only releases?

And how many such "releases" do we want to document?

For example, the official Weezer site has many files for fans to download, including live stuff, demos, and other oddities. These would technically qualify as official releases, but is each item on a given page its own standalone release (sort of like a single) or is the entire page one release? Should we consider Internet releases only when there is no traditional release with which to get the band or lineup into the family tree?

I think we should only consider something a release when it clearly corresponds to a "complete release" of some type. That's still vague, so let me be more clear:
The Accident Experiment have released multiple items available both online and in retail, and some only online. The ones online aren't simply free downloads of songs or miscellaneous other bits. There are whole "albums" and "singles" (with a couple of tracks, not one), available for purchase or sampling at different internet merchants. I would count this.
The Alpha Conspiracy at one point put an entire album on their site for free download and encouraged you to pay them something if you happened to like it, but mostly to spread stuff around. I would count this.
Many bands have put entire tracks from albums, unreleased special mixes, etc. online for fans. I would not count these.

The difference, to me, is a difference between a polished (or not) "release" and some "extra" or "bonus" material. Extra goodies and bonus material, on their own, are not "official releases". They are clearly released to the public in the sense of being available; and they're officially done; but I don't think they're intended to be standalone, catalogable entities and I don't think we should include them.

Yes, this is subjective.

I'm with the "include everything" brigade, even if we get the same sort of situation as we are getting with The Beatles (jeez - *how* many releases?) which I don't like (it makes the Beatles page somewhat unwieldy) but I wholeheartedly support.

The only issue I have is the ongoing one of no distinction being made between "albums", "ep's" and "singles", but I appreciate that somewhat blurry lines between categories and multiple release formats makes this difficult to analyse (I know, I've been trying to do this for a project of my own). Just seeing a vanilla list of releases with no immediate idea of whether it's an album or a single (except by guessing from the title and pic) makes it difficult to "follow the flow", so to speak (in particular, going back to those Beatles releases, when there are those foreign EP releases of what appear to be existing albums in multiple parts).

I'm all for adding extra bonus bits and pieces, whatever bands maka available, if that's what they decide to do (it's all documentation of reality, etc.) ... but there does exist the possibility of these things being somewhat more ephemeral than solid lumps of plastic which have a physical existence. We can not be sure that an internet only release may not suddenly vanish.

Another thing I'd like to note is that if it's so unclear from how a band links its online stuff what a "release" consists of (each track, a whole page, whatever), then it seems pretty clear to me it's not a "release". Real releases are coherent enough entities that they have some kind of name and grouping and can be uniquely identified as such.

Imagine a web page called "Audio / Video Downloads" that includes a gigantic list, say 100 in all, of links to sound files, each file with a unique name and a little bit of descriptive information (like "Live January '01").

MW: Would this be one release called "Audio / Video Downloads" or would it be 100 individual releases?

PK: Would your approach change if the material on this download page was the ONLY music ever publicly released by the band?

I agree that we may have to take a [very] subjective approach to these things because they can get very messy. Weezer, at least for a few albums, posted daily mp3s updates of each song while they were working in the studio to create the official, polished versions. These are clearly official releases of drafts/demos, but do we gain anything by documenting those? I'd like this site to document as much as is reasonably possible, but I only have one lifetime to do it.

I think we have to figure some of this stuff out sooner than later because more and more new bands are using the Internet to distribute music.

Daily mp3 updates from the studio don't count IMO. That's something like a photo-diary that a lot of bands also put up on their websites while recording a new album. Those mp3's are clearly not released to be part of the bands discography; it's just to give the fans an idea of the things that are going on in the studio.

If a web page is called "Audio / Video Downloads" then you can't put that in the db as a gigantic release simply because of the fact that a web page is not static. Such a web page can change on a daily basis and therefore an entry of it in the db can never be guaranteed to be exact.
Listing all individual songs is crazy. I'd say we only list those songs that were recorded by a lineup that's not in the db yet.

To answer Mark's question, I think what I've said above should still cover this. If the band has only ever released a bunch of scattered downloads and there's no notion of a "release" of anything, then no, I would not document anything for them.

Honestly it reminds me of chip tune/metal group Machinae Supremacy's situation. They formed, they made a bunch of individual tracks, they posted a lot of them on their webpage -- after a couple years they actually did an album and released it (in the process removing some of their old song links). I would document the album for them and not the individual tracks they'd released before, regardless of whether their previously released stuff had new lineups.

For that matter, _I'm_ in this situation, as I've released quite a few tracks online, but never an actual album/single/release in any other format, online or not. I don't believe my individual tracks can or should go in the DB. They're not releases, they're _tracks_.

The internet makes it easy to take the demos of screwing around in the studio, or to take individual finished songs, or whatever, and just push them out to the world with no cost. If we consider that stuff worthy of documenting, then I think we ought to rethink our rules on official releases entirely, and head towards the pure family tree/timeline history sort of format. Clearly there are cases (the infamous Exodus demo I submitted) where a real lineup made some real tracks, and to me those are at least as worthy (if not more) of inclusion here as any of what we're discussing...

I think something Python just said rings true. What is actually part of the band's discography? Would a band list individual tracks, or groups thereof, with some title on its discography page? If it's clear they wouldn't (say, because they have such a page and it doesn't list these tracks) then that, to me, is another good indicator that the tracks shouldn't count.

Okay, we're convinced that we should not document every little thing officially released by a band on the Internet because that could get ugly and ridiculous and we only have one lifetime per person to contribute to documenting this stuff.

If a band or a lineup has no traditional release though, we'll allow it. Right now we have four in the tree. All four are for bands/lineups not otherwise recorded, but only one has artwork and a title.

[bandtoband.com] http://bandtoband.com/index.php?Page=Search&AlbumId=5482 from
[mp3.washingtonpost.com] http://mp3.washingtonpost.com/bands/mainline.shtml

[bandtoband.com] http://bandtoband.com/index.php?Page=Search&AlbumId=8019
from
[www.georgetabb.com] http://www.georgetabb.com/George%20Songs.html

and

[bandtoband.com] http://bandtoband.com/index.php?Page=Search&BandId=4975
from
[sonicgarden.net] http://sonicgarden.net/sonic/RA.HTM

I'm not necessary pleased with the bottom three because there's not much information on how/what the songs are.

---

On the subject of that Exodus demo, I've looked at seemingly hundreds of sites and usually find a variation of one or two sentences about the demo, neither of which says anything meaningful. Can anything be inferred from this?

"Well, we have got old demo songs like 'Whipping Queen', 'Death And Domination' and 'Warlords' from the early 80s EXODUS –era and even if they seem to be hunted down very often by many EXODUS – fans around the world, we have never even considered to release them on CD because that´s a whole different era of EXODUS and those songs have nothing to do what we are doing now."

[www.voicesfromthedarkside.de] http://www.voicesfromthedarkside.de/interviews/exodus.htm

That first release definitely looks like a real release to me. It clearly was intended as some kind of unit.

The other three seem a lot more questionable to me, but if that's the route you guys are going, then fine I guess... it does seem to imply that the group has releases available called these things, when in fact they're just song titles.

The important note I have though is that that source you linked for the Letch Patrol song says the title is "How We Rock", not "Howie Rock", and it looks like the "(Live At The Garden)" we document as part of the title is just our informative note we've tacked on? That seems odd. Or did you have an additional source for this one?

As for the Exodus stuff, your sentences don't seem to mean much to me w.r.t. allowing these in the tree or not (except maybe that "hunted down by fans" implies they're aware of and aren't going to try to stop the public availability of these tracks, which might indicate we can put them in? Meh). The only argument I'd make is that I'd think these should go in under a parallel of your internet release argument that you're using to get new lineups into the tree. But since I don't really agree with your internet release position that's not a strong argument :D. Plus I think it weakens the whole idea of what we'll let into the tree -- we might as well just say, "look, we'll put in any real thing the band recorded if it helps us get in more lineups."

I have long since lost any concern I had for the Exodus demo and its ultimate fate, so I'm not going to be bothered either way. I'd probably put it in, but... yeah.

Letch Patrol:

Harris provided the exact title, which includes the parenthetical, here:
[bandtoband.com] http://bandtoband.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=727

That the parenthetical is part of the song title is all the more obvious if you listen to the song--then it's clear that the song is supposed to sound "live" although it was actually recorded in the studio. Former member George Tabb got the title wrong on his web site, but Harris recognizes the release as an official release, albeit a mis-titled one. We corrected the song title under the typo approach that we've taken to band member names, although we've never taken that approach with album titles as far as I know. Trouble.

All this goes to show how annoying internet releases are. I would like to find a better way to document them for the very reason that you (PK) brought up in your second and fourth paragraphs.

--

Exodus:
My point was simply to highlight my failure to find anything that definitively states that the so-called demo was legitimately released by the band.

I completely failed to read/remember that paragraph of Harris'. That is certainly definitive.

Yeah, I agree there's no definitive evidence on the Exodus demo. Perhaps it would be best to just scrap that submission.

In the past decade, Jason Newsted of Metallica has done a bunch of one-off recording projects with a variety of musicians. Very few of them seem to have been released as tangible albums, but some songs can be downloaded from the Chophouse Records web site. All of these projects have band names and specific band members.

Here's an example:
[www.chophouserecords.com] http://www.chophouserecords.com/hoe.swf

This seems like a reasonable item to include in the database, but I'd still like to work out a rule that makes sense. Is every band's myspace.com page deserving of inclusion too?

Have any definitive rules been made concerning internet-only singles? I'm looking to add Weatherman, a side-project that featured Vic Bondi and Tom Morello. Unfortunately, they never had an official release, but Vic Bondi did have demos of three of their songs on his website. The three tracks were from three separate sessions, each given a different "release" year on Bondi's site. There is artwork, the same pic for all three tracks. Band members are listed under the first song and it's implied with the second. The notes for the third song suggest that a drum machine was used and sounds like it may have only been Bondi and Morello.

So I ask you:
1. Would these be acceptable as releases? (If so, i'd probably skip the third one)
2. Would the dates given on Bondi's site be the ones to use for the release dates?
3. Is the artwork on the site acceptable or should artwork not be used since it's not an actual physical release?


My two cents regarding using internet-only songs:
If it's the only way to document a band that has no records/cds or a unique lineup I think it should be considered.

These certainly are acceptable as releases, and if the accompanying artwork is intended to act as album art, then you should use it. Given that the same art shows up for all three tracks, it would make sense (to me) to treat them all as a single release, but if there is no official title that represents all three songs, then you might as well enter them separately with their separate years.