[ ] Fripp & Toyah & Uncle Tom Cobley & All

Toyah and Robert Fripp have been regularly keeping their fans entertained by a series of videos released (appropriately) on Sundays for their YouTube / Facebook fans (I'm unsure of the scope of these). Do we document them?

If so, then does that mean we lay b2b open to *every* ad hoc home video of (connectable) artists passing the time during lockdown?

The game has significantly changed since the pre-digital era, when releasing a record (even just a demo) was a major operation requiring significant effort and dedication. Nowadays it is so easy to get released, everybody is doing it, and a slippery-slope argument leads us to the conclusion that b2b may as a consequence get so cluttered with amateur junk that we may lose focus of where and why this all started.

I'm raising the question now, in order that we get it asked and discussed and answered sooner rather than later.

These threads have some related points we can consider or reconsider as well:

[www.bandtoband.com] http://www.bandtoband.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2521
[www.bandtoband.com] http://www.bandtoband.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2549
[www.bandtoband.com] http://www.bandtoband.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5473

And don't forget the most relevant thread of all:
[www.bandtoband.com] http://www.bandtoband.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10130

I'd agree with ajweitzman there in that you should be able to have your own copy for something to be considered released. Currently the maxim still works quite well because most music distributed to Spotify and YouTube is also distributed to stores such as Amazon and 7Digital which do still sell proper downloads.

Whether it should include the ability to add a DRM-managed copy to your offline library within an app (eg. Spotify or YouTube Music) is debatable (but possibly inevitable, begrudgingly). I don't have the YouTube Music app so I'm not sure whether it works for all videos, but you can watch any video at all via the YouTube Music website, as it's just another interface for regular YouTube content.

If we do start accepting YouTube, we should at least limit that to music placed there via digital distribution, not direct uploads which are too likely to be made by fans or not intended to be a "discography" entry. So just the content that usually says:
"Provided to YouTube by ...

Auto-generated by YouTube."

Yes, I must have missed that last discussion.

I'm okay with that, then -- YouBend vids not allowed in general. Otherwise it "just gets silly".

Worth noting that if ad hoc home videos were given away/sold as downloads from the artist's website, we could count those. Most likely with the 'Digital Release only - no cover exists' image, unless it has some sort of cover image on said website.

Here's another YouTube-only conundrum, from several years ago.

[www.stereogum.com] https://www.stereogum.com/493882/girl-crisis-feat-the-ladies-of-chairlift-class-...
"Here it is, the latest installment from Girl Crisis, an all-female concept troupe operating on a specifically detailed concept. The idea behind it was to a) name themselves as a joke on Boy Crisis and b) exist only in web-video form featuring c) an essentially revolving cast of indie Brooklyn sirens that d) have nothing for sale and will not play live shows but e) are a 'long-term' project that records covers of classic songs, learned and arranged just before performing, in a Greenpoint living room on Super 8mm camera."

Their YouTube channel:
[www.youtube.com] https://www.youtube.com/user/GirlCrisis/videos

I mean, they're home videos, but it feels more than ad hoc, since Girl Crisis was a going concern for quite a while (2008-13) and made a conscious decision to record and release their music this way.

[www.bandtoband.com] http://www.bandtoband.com/band/the-bays

The Bays only perform live -- our one album from them is a live one from 2002. Would love to get their new lineup in (Andy Gangadeen, Oli Wiseman, Kaz Rodriguez, Aicha Djidjelli), but they're YouTube-only now.

[youtube.com] https://youtube.com/thebayslive
[www.thebays.com] http://www.thebays.com/about.html