Re: ASIN Clarification

Christopher Key wrote:
> Quite a lot of releases, especially singles, are only available second
> hand through third party sellers, and the data on their Amazon page is
> often quite lacking, with no official cover art, or no art at all, and
> occasionally no tracklisting.  I do however feel that linking to such
> releases does provide useful information.
>
>  
Which useful information does it provide?

Personally, I think that these Amazon relationships are *only* useful
for their cover art.
I've personally not more interest in Amazon than in any other online shops.
I'm glad they allow MB to display cover art, and that MetaBrainz get
some money from each Amazon purchase when you comes from MB.
That's a win-win situation, but not a reason to become a ASIN zealot.

In fact, I don't like the idea that MB have "buy" links in its user
interface.
I consider that a *free* base shouldn't favor some specifics resellers
and stay neutral. And we can't and don't ([2]) link to all resellers.

This applies to linking to Amazon, but here we're doing a compromise in
order to legally get cover arts for a good percentage of our releases.
But when there's no cover art supplied by Amazon, I don't see the point
to add a link.

> Firstly, if someone is attempting to acquire a specific release, the
> lack of information from Amazon may well make this very difficult.  A
> correct tracklisting / Catalog # / barcode from MusicBrainz pointing to
> a specific ASIN would be very useful.
>
> Secondly, whilst no coverart may be available via AWS, end users can
> still acquire coverart directly, or via some suitable scripted method.
>  
Then you can just add one step to your script: get the ASIN from the
barcode using the AWS.
> Moreover, Amazon may in the future add official coverart, and this would
> then automatically become available to MusicBrainz.
>  
I've yet to see that happen. I suggest that then ASIN is only be added
when the cover art actually becomes available.
> Finally, it provides a useful replacement for the large number of
> incorrect ASINs currently in the system.  There are a lot of cases where
> a set of identically titled albums (with different tracklistings) have
> all been attached to the same ASIN.  
These wrong ASIN have been added automatically in one go ([1]) and they
should be removed.
BTW if you follow the remove queue, you'll even see that each week a
good numbers of them are removed.
> My concern is that should these
> simply be removed, they will end up getting reattached by users wanting
> coverart.
>  
But if they're wrongly reattached (ASIN for a different edition), they
will be voted down.

And sometimes you can't find a cover art for a release. That's
unfortunate, but we have to deal with that.

- Aurélien // murdos

[1] http://blog.musicbrainz.org/?p=318
[2] http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/WhatNotToLinkTo#In_General

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