MusicBrainz is a treasure trove. Open the lid and you will find glittering piles of release metadata. Mountains of precious artist information. Gold nuggets of high resolution artwork. Everything you can imagine – provided you mainly imagine music data. And also, at the bottom, tucked into the corners, some really weird shit. And some MusicBrainz editors just having the time of their life, adding to the pile. One of those editors has agreed to have a chat with me.
Thank you for answering my questions, sound.and.vision! I am really regretting the poop analogy, my deepest apologies. But we are dung-beetle editing buddies, and I know that your additions to the database are a treasure to many. Shall we ‘roll’ with it?
aerozol: At the time of writing, you have been a MusicBrainz editor for 4 years. You have done a lot of editing since then! I know that you contribute to a lot of other online community projects – what was it that attracted you to MusicBrainz, and what has encouraged you to stay on and contribute?
sound.and.vision: The simple answer is that I was having issues with metadata in Plex, and was trying to find out how to best resolve this issue and kept coming across posts mentioning this service called “MusicBrainz”. Shortly after, many of the sub-projects Discogs was running at the time (Filmogs, Bookogs, etc.) came to an abrupt end and I found myself looking at the ‘Brainz universe in more detail. I was taken aback with just how wonderful the project was. It felt like a great fit for me and was in line with my ideals for sharing data online. I’ve been hooked ever since, and I fear that the day Videobrainz arrives I should simply retire, as that will likely consume me entirely!
aerozol: I know that you and I share an affinity for weird and wonderful releases and formats. How did this start for you? In relation to MusicBrainz, did it all start with what has come to be known as ‘FishBrainz’? Or were there other weird items that you added first? And tell us about FishBrainz…
sound.and.vision: I think it starts like it does for many of us (I hope), you find something funny or unusual at a flea market, car boot, op shop, thrift store etc. and you take the gamble and buy it! It might not be very good in the end, but it was interesting enough that you bought it and now you have a little story about it. Some of my favourites are low-production, DIY releases that people produce to showcase their musical talents – these feel a lot more personable to listen to as you can guarantee it was likely made over many gruelling months by very few people who were doing it because they love music, not because a contract told them to do it.
No sadly “FishBrainz” (the idea of having a separate project to simply cataloguing every single iteration of those wall-mounted singing fish) wasn’t the start of it, but it did certainly spur on the idea that MusicBrainz can be used to catalog what I deem fringe releases (as they lie on the outer edges of what one might expect from such a project) instead of the database being full of traditional media (CDs, vinyl, cassettes etc.).
Although I guess many of us could see it coming, considering the second release I ever submitted to the database was a mixed-mode PC game with CD audio tracks; Test Drive 4.
aerozol: As far as I’m concerned, FishBrainz already went live, when teethfairy created the Big Mouth Billy Bass series on MusicBrainz. One of the things that I always find interesting is how easy it is to dismiss these releases as nonsense. But Big Mouth Billy Bass sold thousands and thousands of copies (per day!) in its heyday – but who knows who actually composed the music? MusicBrainz knows. These kinds of commercial throw-away hits often give a better snapshot of human culture than the ‘classier’ musical releases we’d perhaps choose to put on that pedestal. At least, in my opinion.
Okay, let’s jump straight into the good stuff. Give us your top crazy music formats.
sound.and.vision: I’m often quite bad at remembering the names of all of the various format names, certainly difficult when some of them were highly region specific. UK YouTuber techmoan (“Mat”) is considered to be a great resource for finding out about these formats, and is where I often find out about some of my personal favourites! There are also some people archiving these items on The Internet Archive, which can also be a great resource.
For me the ones that get me going the most are either the formats that are clearly intended for children (HitClips, Pocket Rockers and e-Kara cartridges) or those that are intended for very specific purposes that joe public wouldn’t ever know about (such as the 3M Cantata which was used for background muzak, the Philips BMS2600 or AEI ProPac’s).
aerozol: Ooh, Pocket Rockers. “Two hot songs! No need to rewind!” What a value proposition.
Some of these releases must be quite elusive, buried and forgotten. A lot of them, let’s be honest, deservedly so. Do you struggle to find good data for niche releases? What is your process? Share your top editing tips and resources!
sound.and.vision: Yes definitely, some of these items simply haven’t been documented anywhere, or the places that might have documented any information are buried in old microfilm or old magazines. Ultimately the best process is to go back to basics wherever possible. Try and do as much research as you can and go with sources that can be relied upon – photographs are a great example of this. But also don’t be afraid if you don’t have all the information straight away. MusicBrainz is very flexible in that regard, and you can come back at a later date with the additional data.
aerozol: I also find MusicBrainz’ “it doesn’t have to be perfect, just an improvement” ethos really helpful. I just got side-tracked adding artwork to some of the e-Kara cartridges that you have added…
Have you reached the next level yet? By that I mean hunted down some of these releases in person/online, and defiled your abode with them. Is there a holy grail weird release that you really want to own? And which one do you think is truly just the worst format? I really want to try Tooth Tunes. I don’t know if I’ve lived until I’ve heard a song ‘transmitted through enamel and bone’.
sound.and.vision: You know I only know Tooth Tunes from the various memes that came out over the years, I never recall them being sold in the UK; but they might have just passed me by when they were released. Not entirely yet on the topic of buying them up, I have enough tat (a beautifully British expression that pretty much sums all of this up) in my home already and it turns out not many people want some of this stuff so it lingers for years until someone buys it or I find some poor sod to offload it onto! Not sure I’ve really encountered a “worst” format but I do think that many of the electronic “toys” that have music components from the 90s-00’s are going to be up there with the top-tier of landfill fodder – so I guess the award goes to those McDonalds Happy Meal toys that played a short sample of pop track on loop (here’s the Girls Aloud one).
aerozol: What are some of the challenges in terms of making these releases fit into MusicBrainz schema? Does MusicBrainz cope with them well, or are there issues you consistently run into, when adding these? And is there anything that you would like to add to MusicBrainz, but just doesn’t fit.
sound.and.vision: Of course there are challenges, MusicBrainz has (rightfully) been built with traditional formats in mind, the project isn’t called WeirdMusicFormatBrainz! [Give it time – aerozol] But you’ll find that with some careful thought and consideration you can get the information into the database. The tricky parts will be finding the right format (and there comes the question of how many of these “special” formats should be added to that list) and then finding a way to either extract the audio or record it so you can get a nice fingerprint and duration. Disambiguations and annotations however are your biggest friend with these releases as it stops confusion later down the road.
As for something that I’d like to add that currently doesn’t fit yet is sheet music, and other similar types of what I term scripted music; so includes things like tabs, trackers, MIDI etc. These are difficult to add currently as MusicBrainz is mostly interested in a finalised piece of music; i.e. what is finally recorded, produced, mixed and mastered – not the instructions on how you might be able to create that music yourself. I think it’s a wonderful world, and it’s a great enjoyment to watch talented folk pick up sheet music and just start playing it (not me sadly). They might not even be familiar with the piece of music, but because sheet music works so well it often comes out just about right. These could then link into works and give a bigger and better overview of what music exists; along with this there are rafts of old folk music that doesn’t currently exist as recordings but instead only as ancient sheet music.
aerozol: MusicBrainz is a bit of a ‘notability’ wild west, when compared to a lot of other databases, such as Wikipedia. But musicians (and marketers looking for a fresh gimmick) are always inventing new ways to fuck up the concept of “what is a release”. I remember adding a blank head cleaning cassette to MusicBrainz, because I wanted to store the cool cover/graphic design, and I was sure it would be removed. But it has stuck around, to my surprise. What kind of releases do you find get push-back, and what is welcomed with open arms by the MusicBrainz community? Any surprises? Anything you haven’t added because it’s too much (or too little), even for MusicBrainz?
sound.and.vision: Hello fellow trouble-maker, I also added a few “lens cleaners” to Discogs way back, and then others started doing it too, so we made a rather short list of them.
Ultimately bucking the trend and pushing the fringes of the project is good, but expect to give a reason for why it should be included. I still think ringtones (polyphonic, realtone etc.) should be added, but I think that people might start losing their minds on that; so I’ve stayed away from those. Sample packs for early DAW software can also be interesting. My argument (ok, this doesn’t work for ringtones but bear with) is that although on the surface things like sample packs and sound effects packages seem pointless to record, there are some smart people out there who are able to pick out the samples used in modern music and link it back to those packages. Do you really like that snare? OK, well here is every track we’ve found that uses it!
What’s welcomed with open arms, well I feel video game soundtracks have finally been given a bit of a fair pass as they’re quite important (and plenty of people, including myself, listen to them frequently while working), but that might also be due to video game companies now releasing them properly instead of hoping your PlayStation or Sega CD will play in your CD player and Not Damage Your Hi-Fi Equipment.
aerozol: We’ve talked a lot about your interesting MusicBrainz contributions, but you occasionally allude to other projects that you’re working on. Some are relevant to MusicBrainz, like the invaluable MP3.com static archive that you set up and maintain. Some are alien creatures. What are some other interesting projects you are contributing to, or have contributed to? Yes, I really just want to hear more about the teletext archive project! But perhaps you are hiding other fun secrets from me?
sound.and.vision: Yes, see I have an itchy brain, and that means I have to keep it busy with various projects – surely I’m not the only one who falls asleep at night trying to visualise an interconnected spider web of all of the MusicBrainz entities? No? OK, well I came to be aware of the MP3.com dump via Twitter and found it to be a rather amazing window into the world of early digital music distribution. A lot of this stuff is gone – old MySpace is pretty much gone, and so are some of the more unheard of projects like peoplesound. Of course, a wide variety of things were picked up by the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine, but not everything. There was a wealth of data from MP3.com that simply doesn’t exist within it. However the dump, like many dumps, was raw and difficult to navigate. But with some general knowledge of HTML and some scripting I managed to pull together a sort of “archive” of my own that people could browse. There’s no music to stream, that would be a considerable amount of storage to host and also has potential issues with copyright, however the artist pages are there to look at and usually have enough information to allow for suitable submissions to MusicBrainz. It’s recently been moved to a new host and is back up and running for anyone to look at. I often forget it’s there but I do receive the occasional email or forum reply to ask about it, or thanks, and so far only one take-down request!
My other projects that I am actively involved in are my Internet Archive profile which is currently 4,500+ items of assorted content from TV adverts, user manuals, car brochures and other miscellanea and is ever growing. And, as you have previously alluded to, Teletext archiving or archaeology or recovery, or whatever you want to call it.
A brief explanation; Teletext was an information service that was made available in the UK from 1974 till roughly 2012. Although rather basic in its look, this service was a common way many Brits got their news, sports results, weather forecasts, tv listings, betting information, booked holidays, read reviews and got local information via their television set. A lot of people have a fondness for the service as it was rather useful, and more importantly it was free to use. There aren’t many (if any) archives of Teletext, as most of what was being broadcast wasn’t backed up to any kind of storage medium and when a page needed to be updated it was simply overwritten – however some very smart people figured out that due to the way the data was broadcast to television sets that it probably existed on old VHS tapes that people widely made before the advent of PVR systems. This meant that there is the potential that any old VHS recording of Dr Who, Gardeners’ World or Big Brother from a British television channel could possibly contain the teletext data that was being broadcast at that moment. Those smart people got together with some other smart people and figured out that a particular type of old video capture card sold in the late 90s and early 2000s could read that data and spit it out into a big long file. Then with some programming and scripting magic, it could be deconvolved into a carousel that can then be loaded into one of many different interactive Teletext viewers or editors to be experienced again. There was a project that held a few thousand recoveries, but it’s currently under maintenance. But you can see an example of some of these interactive recoveries in your web browser. At the moment I am in the weeds doing my recoveries, not every tape produces a good result (some actually produce pure techno garbage) but I do have a few that are really nice recoveries and I hope to make them available sometime soon. You can see the progress I am making on my website.
From a MusicBrainz point of view Teletext has value in the same way a local newspaper or even a magazine could. The most popular Teletext services (either BBC’s CEEFAX or the aptly named “Teletext”) would include pages dedicated to music; including news, rumours, charts, release dates, reviews and gig listings. For me the most interesting are the regional pages which will list local events happening, so you can find out who might have been playing at your local pub in 2002! And before you ask, of course I’ve begun to pump some of this information into MusicBrainz, who do you take me for?
aerozol: Before we wrap up, let’s head back to MusicBrainz. We’ve talked about, and linked, a few weird formats, but there are a bunch of ways to explore interesting music on MusicBrainz. Your MusicBrainz profile is a trove of interesting links. One of my favourites is your Garbage Heap collection, as well as your CritiqueBrainz reviews – particularly the low scoring ones. Is there anything particularly close to your heart, and do you have any other recommendations for collections or tags etc to browse?
sound.and.vision: As you can probably guess my interests range far and wide, and for the most part I’ll try anything. But a few years ago I had to put a stop to that, before I took up additional interests in collecting beer mats or fishing lures. The thing I like the most is people’s collections. I always enjoy a museum where you have someone’s collection on display – collecting is such a unique thing we do as humans and I think it’s a great thing that helps bring us together in a community. Sure we have our differences on how those collections should be displayed, but the love of the material exists under all of that.
Some people think, from my CB reviews, that I am a grumpy ol’ tit, which some days I am. But for the most part I am pretty positive about things. However, I find it easier to write little rants about poor quality releases, often from big faceless corpo’s who should know better.
My Forgotten in the Charity Shop is my personal favourite collection, and mirrors your Treasure collection. These homemade DIY releases might not be anything groundbreaking, but they are interesting insights into someone’s hobby or project, that they probably put a lot of time and effort into. I try to avoid reviewing these kinds of releases these days, as it can come off mean spirited when you consider what someone has achieved, sometimes entirely alone – but sometimes you can find some really fun releases like this CD by Charlie Haylock.
aerozol: I can see how some readers might see me painting you as a miser by highlighting your reviews and collections of ‘bad’ releases. But I think we rag on releases, particularly DIY releases, while still having a lot of love for them. But I agree that in cases where there has been an earnest attempt, the musicians who poured their heart out might feel differently about a negative review – and might even rather have their music forgotten altogether (something we would see as a travesty). I approve of your approach of handling heart-felt attempts with care, and going absolutely ham on awful corporate cash-ins!
Anything else?
sound.and.vision: To anyone that made it this far, thank-you. To those who scrolled straight to the bottom to read the comments, I don’t blame you. Time is short on this spinny mudball, but my hope is that the time for MusicBrainz is forever. Maybe one day, when the aliens come to the wreck of this planet, they will find solace and enjoyment in looking at our record of the art we made throughout our existence.
Thank you again for your time, sound.and.vision! May your next thrift shop visit gift you a dusty box filled with weird and wonderful musical treasure.
Got any weird releases of your own? Show ’em off in the comments.
ah, good old Teletext, the important question though is if you were a ‘Ziner or a Backchatter?