[Secret Squirrel]

Superceded by new VGMdb scope document.

I've recently been thinking about tightening up the eligibility requirements for some non-anime and non-game albums. Specifically, as part of the Visual Arts branding we cover music related to manga. While manga is not a musical medium, this tends to cover certain image, character song, and dramatic albums. However, as we allow off-genre albums related to our core focuses, this has allowed eligibility for live-action Movie and TV soundtracks that were adapted from manga. While this isn't harmful on its own, the problem is that manga is pervasive in Japan, and I suspect that a large percentage of TV shows and movies source themselves from a manga, so that we would end up cataloging all Japanese live action. I don't feel like this is the right place (or maybe time) for doing that.

So, I would like to propose that albums for live-action TV and Movies will no longer be permitted UNLESS there is also an anime or game adaptation.

I think we have a precedent for this on the Western side, where we don't allow all the Marvel movie soundtracks even though they are sourced from comics. There is perhaps some room for discussion, and we still allow some of these as Works albums to add variety to composer discographies, as long as we don't go crazy.

I haven't said anything about Tokusatsu. Or for that matter, a fair number of other unrelated taxonomies like happy hardcore, or vocaloid, or idol-character multimedia franchises, or non-comiket doujin music. These are all things that have slipped in because trusted editors or staff were interested in them. Sometimes it was under the radar, while other times I pushed the Approve button because the information was well-crafted and it was easier than raising a fuss. I know that people have differing opinions on these, but I'm not ready to take the axe to any of them. Some want certain subsets nuked, but are fine with others. I wish there was a simple formula to decide what should be here and what shouldn't, but I haven't found one.

Anyway, I've mostly caught up on the recent backlog of new submissions, and I'm going to hide a bunch of recent live-action albums that are currently in the queue. There will be some past submissions that are removed, but I don't expect that to be a large number.