Hi everybody,
recently I've realised that the way OSTs and Musicals are organised is quite unsatisfying. For instance, there are three different artists for Beauty and the Beast OST, Beauty and the Beast OST 2017 and Beauty and the Beast (Musical). The songs are pretty much the same (even though there are are probably some extra songs in the musical version, I have to check on that). Pretty much the same applies for all Disney films with live-action remakes and musical versions as well as all stage musicals that are based on films (and vice versa). I find that a bit confusing, to say the least, since some of the songs appear under all three artists and others only under one of them and so on. None of them is usually what might be seen as "complete".
I'd like to make three suggestions how to deal with that:
1) Keep both/all three "artists" but include the songs that appear in various different productions only in the earliest release and then add a link on top that says "You can find the songs that had already appeared in the 19xx film version here". So Beauty and the Beast (Musical) would only include the songs that exclusively appear in the musical version and so on.
2) Merge both/all three artists and add annotations to the title for disambiguation (such as "XY (2017)"), songs with identical lyrics would be merged.
3) Same as 2) but use the album feature for disambiguation.
My preferred way would be 3) since it can also be used for gathering all recordings in one specific language. In that case, I think the songs should be sorted by album by default.
One more thing: I think there should be a uniform way of adding annotations to a song title. Call me crazy, but it drives me nuts that sometimes it's "XY (German Version)", sometimes "XY [German Version]", just "XY (German)" or even "German Title [English Title] (German Version) - Reprise".
