Thinking about Harmony and how it could be adapted to support fair music platforms.
Do you know about Harmony?
It is a tool that can import releases into MusicBrainz – so you provide an existing BandCamp, Discogs, Spotify, Tidal, etc. URL for a release and it shuffles all of that info into MusicBrainz.
It supports the following metadata providers as input (see Supported Providers) heading:
Seems like the various fair platforms (Faircamp, Mirlo, Jam.coop) could benefit from a common metadata format for release info - after all, internally, they must have a data model to express each release.
If that model could be externalized as a json or xml or other format that sits side-by-side with the release at some well-known URL then perhaps the developer of Harmony could easily add support. And if all of the platforms coordinated, they could add multiple fair sites in one go.
I am not sure whether Canimus (or the upcoming evolution of it) embodies that metadata format or not… but then artists who ONLY exist on fair platforms could benefit from Harmony for getting releases into MusicBrainz easily.
FWIW, Chorus (the successor to Canimus) is available although still technically a draft spec.
Chorus’s primary purpose is providing release-centric metadata for the purpose of pulling it into a music player (particularly for streaming purposes), although that’s not particularly different from the metadata provided by Bandcamp or the like. Harmony could definitely draw from a Chorus collection to get metadata to import into MusicBrainz.
I would think that a Chorus-published release would still be a different release than, say, the CD version of an album, since it’s purely a streaming/preview rendition. By design a lot of stuff won’t even be in the Chorus metadata for a lot of artists. For example, on my own Chorus feed, none of the hidden/bonus tracks are currently published at all, while the MusicBrainz data reflects the full releases, so there’s already a mismatch.
I’m not sure how Harmony handles that though, since at a glance it seems to just be scraping the public web content on Bandcamp, which also doesn’t display hidden tracks beyond possibly mentioning how many tracks are on the full release.
For one example of this, my album Love and Monsters has a hidden track that’s in the MusicBrainz data but not the Chorus feed, nor is it visible in the Bandcamp release page, although Mirlo makes it visible (albeit not available to preview).
There’s also a potential complication in that a single Chorus album can technically embed multiple track listings and even recorded versions as part of its (optional) internationalization support. I’m not sure if that feature will ever be properly supported by anyone (insofar as Chorus itself is still extremely theoretical at this stage) but it definitely complicates things. I think for that situation it’d be fair to just have every embedded locale be a separate release within the release group though (which is certainly nothing new by any means).
jfyi - Harmony does detect bonus (hidden) tracks on BandCamp somehow. I presume they are using an API instead of scraping the web because other details emerge (like label) which does not always show on the rendered page.
Harmony, however, did not have track info for those bonus tracks - the track title came through as [unknown] and the track length was empty. I had to manually adjust those in MusicBrainz directly after downloading the album, unzipping, and learning the details.
A minor point but yeah there are gotchas everywhere.
It would help someone like sknob though, who ONLY releases on Faircamp I think.
But judging from his comments on my Mastodon thread about the Harmony and MusicBrainz UI he’d be unlikely to use it anyway.
jfyi - Harmony does detect bonus (hidden) tracks on BandCamp somehow. I presume they are using an API instead of scraping the web because other details emerge (like label) which does not always show on the rendered page.
Hm, interesting. I wonder where it’s getting it from, because even the presence of a hidden track isn’t in the JSON-LD blob as far as I can tell.
Maybe it’s just seeing that there’s 13 tracks and then assuming they’re all at the end. What does it say for Deadnames? The funky thing with that one is it has two hidden tracks, but one of them is in the middle of the album (tracks 16 and 24).
But judging from his comments on my Mastodon thread about the Harmony and MusicBrainz UI he’d be unlikely to use it anyway.
Yeah, personally (and as I mentioned on the thread) the way I tag stuff on Musicbrainz is usually using Picard to generate the release, because the UX on that is less infuriating. And in that case Faircamp (or Bandcrash/Mirlo/iTunes/whatever) is doing all the work by tagging the files to begin with.
