Style/Specific types of releases/Live bootlegs

Style Guideline for Live Bootlegs

Status: This is a ProposedStyleGuideline trying to incorporate UntitledBootlegStyle and a new style for titled live bootlegs.

There are two kinds of live bootlegs: those that have a title and those that have none.

Live bootlegs without a title:

• An untitled bootleg of a live concert must be named by concatenating its date and location information as follows:
  • YYYY-MM-DD: Location

Live bootlegs with a title:

• The title of live bootleg that already has a distinct name can be extended with date and location information as follows:
  • [YYYY-MM-DD: ]Title[: Location]

The Location must be formatted as

• [Place, ]City, [State, ]Country

where:

• the parts in square brackets are optional
• YYYY-MM-DD is the date of the recording including the year (YYYY), month (MM) and day of month (DD)
• Place is the name of the location where the concert took place (name of the hotel, stadium, hall, etc.)
• City is the city, town or village
• State is interesting to distinguish cities with identical names from each other (like Houston, TX for Houston in Texas)
• Country the country.

Additional Notes

This guideline must not be used for live bootleg compilations, which are releases that collect tracks from different live session. E.g. Highway of Diamonds, Volume 1: The Never Ending Tour

This guideline can be applied to releases which feature a complete live session and additional bonus tracks (those can be live tracks from other concerts or studio recordings). E.g. 2002-05-02: Ahoy, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (disc 2)

Rationale

In a lot of cases the most important information for live bootlegs is the date when the concert took place. Hiding this information for bootlegs where the person who compiled the release added a title means, that it is harder to find a special recording of a live session, because live bootlegs often don't have a release date.

Adding the place is useful for finding all concerts an artist performed in one city over the years or all concerts that took place in a special location by using the search interface. Besides that this kind of information would be lost or nearly lost when it was added to the annotation.

On the other hand, there are bootleg releases of special concerts that have a well known title. In those cases its normally appropriate to list them under their title only.

Examples

Live bootlegs without a title:

• 2002-05-02: Ahoy, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Live bootlegs with a well-known title:

• Gaslight Tapes (may be replaced with a better one, as this is quasi-legitimate)

Please add examples for every described case here.

Answers to Checklist

Answers to the questions on ChecklistForStyleChanges.

How will this affect the data?

Only album titles of live bootleg releases are affected. It simplifies the process of searching live bootleg releases by concert location and date of the concert.

It further affects the sorting of live bootleg releases in the album list on the artist page. Today this sorting is done by album title. By applying this guideline, albums will be sorted by date of the concert. (Note, that live bootlegs normally don't have a release date.)

In addition to the note on the last paragraph it is worth mentioning, that editors sometimes choose the release date field to store the date of the concert. This leads to wrong data. This proposal might help in minimizing this kind of editor mistakes.

Conflicts with other Style Guidelines

If this proposal is accepted, UntitledBootlegStyle will become obsolete, so it can be removed.

Required Editor Time

Application of this guideline is optional, there will be no data that has to be changed after the proposal is accepted. Although it is likely that some data might be changed to reflect the style allowed by this proposal. This will happen in an evolving way over time.

Required Developer Time

no code changes required

Impact on Paying Clients

Some album titles might be different than before. This only applies for bootleg releases which have a volatile album title anyway. Albums with a well-known title must not be changed according to this proposal, so the impact on Paying Clients is: none to minimal.

Discussion

How do we deal with albums that are (concert) registrations from one concert, but with a bonus track from another concert on another date? e.g. 2002-05-02: Ahoy, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (disc 2) --Zout

• I'd suggest exactly as it is done in this example. As with every kind of "bonus" stuff on a release, those don't influence the main properties of the release. In case, it is a mixture of a lot of unrelated live tracks from different concerts, then this guideline shouldn't be applied at all. Any objections? I added this as an explanation to the text above. --Fuchs
  • This is fine. But we need examples for all cases described. I've provided 4, others please add some more ;) --Zout