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  #1  
Old Mar 7, 2020, 05:15 PM
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Secret Squirrel Secret Squirrel is offline
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Default Album Submission Eligibility

Superceded by new VGMdb scope document.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.
  #2  
Old Mar 8, 2020, 07:38 AM
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My only worry with this tightening is that it makes vgmdb more and more unfeasible for listing all possible releases by a particular composer. Complete listing > incomplete listing. The latter is essentially useless as the effort to document would then have to happen elsewhere.
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Old Mar 8, 2020, 08:22 AM
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Originally Posted by Datschge View Post
My only worry with this tightening is that it makes vgmdb more and more unfeasible for listing all possible releases by a particular composer. Complete listing > incomplete listing. The latter is essentially useless as the effort to document would then have to happen elsewhere.
We were seeing a lot of soundtrack submissions with loose connections to the db. Many of them were by composers that do not have a large presence in vgm/anime. If an artist only has a few soundtracks in the db, then we probably shouldn't be accepting their entire discography. That's the basic idea behind this proposal.
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Old Mar 8, 2020, 08:52 AM
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Originally Posted by nextday View Post
We were seeing a lot of soundtrack submissions with loose connections to the db. Many of them were by composers that do not have a large presence in vgm/anime. If an artist only has a few soundtracks in the db, then we probably shouldn't be accepting their entire discography. That's the basic idea behind this proposal.
I'm fine with that.
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Old Mar 8, 2020, 09:57 PM
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I'm fundamentally against making anything more restrictive especially with the largely arbitrary and poorly documented ruleset we currently have (if you can even call it that). I'm assuming this is because you're getting annoyed/overwhelmed in the submission queue with things you don't want to be validating and while I sympathize, I would rather have a poorly submitted album that can later (maybe) get cleaned up than to not have one at all.

I'm still in favor of better site-wide frontend fliters that allow you to filter out things you don't want to see. This would be a perfect example of that. If you're not interested in these kinds of things then there should be an option to hide them everywhere -- whether in Artist pages, search results, calendar, etc. There is always value in having tangentially related things in the database.
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Old Apr 1, 2020, 04:24 PM
Yokubou Yokubou is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nextday View Post
We were seeing a lot of soundtrack submissions with loose connections to the db. Many of them were by composers that do not have a large presence in vgm/anime. If an artist only has a few soundtracks in the db, then we probably shouldn't be accepting their entire discography. That's the basic idea behind this proposal.
So if an artist has hundreds of album credits, then we can go ahead and submit works that are unrelated to visual arts/games? I know that unrelated entries are currently "hidden" and don't show up via db search or artist discographies. As long as they can be found via google search and added to collections, that's good enough for me to go ahead and add entries for the albums.
  #7  
Old Apr 1, 2020, 05:32 PM
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Originally Posted by Yokubou View Post
So if an artist has hundreds of album credits, then we can go ahead and submit works that are unrelated to visual arts/games? I know that unrelated entries are currently "hidden" and don't show up via db search or artist discographies. As long as they can be found via google search and added to collections, that's good enough for me to go ahead and add entries for the albums.
I don't think number of credits is the best metric. It's a lot easier for singer or songwriter to rack up credits than an artist who only works on soundtracks.

These guidelines are mainly in place to prohibit albums from random live action TV shows and movies. The eligibility of original works (with no connection to any media) hasn't changed.

Last edited by cal; Apr 7, 2020 at 10:09 PM. Reason: typo
  #8  
Old Apr 1, 2020, 07:51 PM
Yokubou Yokubou is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nextday View Post
I don't think number of credits isn't the best metric. It's a lot easier for singer or songwriter to rack up credits than an artist who only works on soundtracks.

These guidelines are mainly in place to prohibit albums from random live action TV shows and movies. The eligibility of original works (with no connection to any media) hasn't changed.
That's fair. I guess I didn't really ask what I wanted to ask.

Going off of Secret Squirrel's post in this thread, I'm left with a lot of questions. Take this album for example. Seems like it was approved, but for what reasons? None of the composers have an artist page. So Merami is a notable enough performer, then? But her personal circle/label, Cosmopolitan, doesn't have a page. Granted, it doesn't need to as none of the songs from it are directly related to VGM/visual arts. The only reason I can see, then, is that having a notable enough performer on it gives the album a pass. [Edit: oops]

So I can go ahead and add more "works" for Merami? Her ratio of related to unrelated works would still be good.

Last edited by Yokubou; Apr 1, 2020 at 07:55 PM.
  #9  
Old Apr 1, 2020, 09:59 PM
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Originally Posted by Yokubou View Post
That's fair. I guess I didn't really ask what I wanted to ask.

Going off of Secret Squirrel's post in this thread, I'm left with a lot of questions. Take this album for example. Seems like it was approved, but for what reasons? None of the composers have an artist page. So Merami is a notable enough performer, then? But her personal circle/label, Cosmopolitan, doesn't have a page. Granted, it doesn't need to as none of the songs from it are directly related to VGM/visual arts. The only reason I can see, then, is that having a notable enough performer on it gives the album a pass. [Edit: oops]

So I can go ahead and add more "works" for Merami? Her ratio of related to unrelated works would still be good.
Albums released at events (Comiket, M3, etc.) are generally accepted as long as they are submitted correctly.

Events have been part of our coverage for a long time.
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