History:Artist Intent Vs Facts Proposal

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Status: This page describes a failed proposal. It is not official, and should only be used, if at all, as the basis for a new proposal.



Proposal number: RFC-Unassigned
Champion: None
Status: Failed, due to Unknown
This proposal was not tracked in Trac.


Status: This was part of a failed MusicBrainz Philosophy proposal made several years ago. However, specific to this page, something like this page may also be needed, either within Artist Intent, or to stand against it. Until such a rewrite/integration/delete decision is made by the Style Council, please do not delete this page.

Artistic Intent vs. The Facts

Should MusicBrainz be concerned with recording the facts, or the artistic expression (ArtistIntent)? Current practice with the StyleGuideline etc. seems to be heavily into recording facts only and losing the actual artistic expression such as formatting and capitalization of the titles. This is a fairly reasonable decision, as the facts are much less likely to change between reprints and with time. But to which degree should this be used as a guide?

Some issues:

Misprints and errors in the original materials
As an example, there's an album where a song apparently about a "Nightquest" was printed as "Nightguest" (a more common concept for sure) on the album cover. As it's possible that this album would be re-released with the corrected printing later on, it's very tempting to enter "Nightquest" as the title. But how can moderators be sure this wasn't a wordplay intended by the band?
Obvious misprints and errors
Kind of like the last class, but specifically when it's clear there's an error. For example one album cover had two track titles swapped between each other. It was easy to tell from lyrics and from comparing to demos of the same track. While entering the intended title instead of the accidental title will avoid problems if the error is fixed in later misprint, this causes trouble for users as the track may be known by either title and people may believe they're fixing an error by changing things back to how the album cover reads.
Additional information on titles, that doesn't typically belong in there
There's a problem in that we don't presently have out-of-band information so any information added is indistinguishable from official parts of the title. For example some albums have been released with the designation "Limited Edition" in the title, and it isn't possible to tell this from a specification added by people entering the data.
When an artist seems to be using formatting to convey a specific idea
Bit limited on specific examples, but for example http://www.musicbrainz.org/showalbum.html?albumid=150735 seems to have two alternate titles for each track, neither which is less important or derived. Another one is the multipart tracks on many albums.
Cases where the artist or record-company specifically calls an album/track something unintuitive
For example, calling tracks "Bonustrack 1" on album cover despite the track having a real name. Recording facts seems to speak for entering the real name of the track, but again what if the artist really meant that track/version to be called "Bonustrack 1"?
What about albums that are intentionally re-released with new titles etc?
Again I don't have links to specific cases, but it sometimes happens that the exact same album has different titles between printings. Should they be the same or different database record?