There is sometimes confusion when voting on merging musical albums, releases, and tracks, due to the detailed Freebase data model for recorded music. This is an attempt to provide guidance in those situations.
Merging between types. This should never happen. Albums and releases are distinct, and should never be the same topic, nor should tracks and albums or tracks and releases.
Merging artists. Each performing artist—whether a person or a band—should have one topic. A person with multiple performance names should have a single topic. Their best-known name should be the display name, and their other names (possibly including their real name) should be aliase (e.g., Sting has an alias of Gordon Sumner). It is up to the community whether a band with changed line-up is still the same band (e.g. Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship) and whether a one-man band is the same as the band itself (e.g., Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor).
Merging albums. We rely on community consensus to determine the nature of an album; use your best judgment here. Is My Album (Remastered Special Edition) the same album as My Album? Usually, the answer is yes; it is possible, however, that the track listing is so very different that it should be considered a separate album.
- Albums without tracks. We have not imported tracks for all the albums in Freebase. If you aren’t sure whether two albums should be merged, please skip them rather than guessing.
- Merging singles. Many times, an artist will release one song as a bunch of different singles, all with the same title. Freebase treats singles as very small albums, with just a handful of tracks. Two single albums should be considered equivalent if they share nearly all the same track listing. Watch out for remixes, though; many single albums consist of multiple mixes of the same song, and two singles should not be considered equivalent if they have mostly different mixes.
- Merging discs. We have tried to clean up multi-disc albums, but you may some across albums called My Album (disc 1) or My Album (disc 2). These should not be merged; nor should a one-disc part (My Album (disc 1)) be merged with a complete album (My Album).
Merging releases. It is almost never the case that two releases should be merged. Different releases of an album usually have different track listings, or sometimes contain different masterings or different versions of their tracks. MusicBrainz, where we get most of our musical release information, distinguishes between releases based on an audio fingerprint; two releases with different fingerprints are almost certainly different releases.
Merging tracks. As with releases, it is almost never the case that two tracks should be merged. Two recordings with the same title by the same artist may represent alternate takes, radio edits, live versions, or remasterings, and without authoritative information, it is best to err on the side of keeping tracks separate. We attempt to use the audio fingerprint information in MusicBrainz to merge tracks that are actually the same, but otherwise, user merges are unlikely to be accurate.
