User talk:Blz 2049 - Wikipedia

You've done a great job with the new material at Single (music)#In South Korea. Based on what you have found during your research, would you consider this material to be best placed where it is now, or possibly moved to a new section at Album, or perhaps even to become its own article? This matters for the links and redirects in the new Template "type" that we had implemented yesterday, just to wrap it all up. If you think it's best as-is, no problem. If you feel that one of the other options is valid, I can help out as needed. Thanks for your work on this topic and for your wise comments back in the original discussion at the Albums Project. ---DOOMSDAYER520 (Talk|Contribs) 19:43, 6 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

Thank you! It was an interesting (and really productive) discussion. I think it's probably best placed within Single (music). At most, I would include "single album" in the "see also" section of Album, where there is a link to extended play as well. At some point, "single album" could stand as its own article. It could even do so now, it would just be quite stubby. But I think "single albums" are better sorted onto the "single" page for the following reasons (I'm also using this as an opportunity to clear out any remaining thoughts I didn't publish on that talk page):

• The extent that single albums are "albums" relies on the Korean definition of the word, where album refers primarily to physical media. The western conception of "album" remains "a long-playing musical release, usually with multiple songs/compositions (or one very long song/composition), regardless of whether it is carried on physical or digital media".
• I don't think single albums are a subset of the western definition of "albums". Not the same way that categories like "studio album", "live album", "double album", even "mixtape", etc. are subsets of the western concept of an "album". I do think single albums are a distinct release type that happens to have "album" in its name.
• Putting aside the slippery "how is an album defined" question, a single album is an "album" with a primary purpose of promoting the single(s) it contains. The concept of a "single" is still more central than the definition of an album.
• Most importantly, there's the overlap. In the post-digital music market, "singles" and "single albums" are distinct "types" of releases; but in the analog era, my understanding is that Koreans would have called any single a "single album". Before some point in the 90s, and certainly in the era before CDs entered the music market, what westerners called "singles" and what Koreans called "single albums" would have referred to the same thing, and (from what I found) Koreans continue to use the phrase "single album" in historical/retrospective descriptions of such releases.

In my research, I found examples of pre-digital physical singles referred to as 싱글 음반 ("single album"). These uses of the phrase were from documents dated within the last 10 years or so, showing that the term is still used when describing historical singles on physical media—a time before Korea had developed a cognizable division between a "single" and "single album". "Strawberry Fields Forever" / "Penny Lane" would have been called a single album, and would still be called a single album today, as long as you're talking about the 7-inch record that was sold in 1967. The current Korean usage of "single" didn't arise until the digital music era.

So those are my reasons why it should be under the "Single" article. What's more: while I continue to believe that "single album" is best understood as its own distinct category of release, that differentiation seems like somewhat of a historical/linguistic accident or quirk. In addition to Korean Wikipedia, I consulted Namuwiki, a more freeform (but also, far more popular) Korean wiki. On that site's article 싱글(음악) ("Singles (Music)"), there is this interesting excerpt—roughly translated via Google, with some clean-ups and bracketed interventions on my part to reflect my interpretation, but you'll get the idea:

"The word 'single album' [to describe a previously mentioned release] is the wrong expression in the first place. I make a mistake of writing a single album in the media that deals with music ... This is because Koreans think of 'album' as the meaning of 'record'. There is a single in Korea because there were only regular albums without EP, there were many people who mistook 'album' for 'record', so it is wrong to say that 'single album' means 'single album'. Currently, the music market in Korea develops the concepts of singles and EPs, selling singles as digital singles and EPs as mini-albums. ...

"It is Korean music market to use the wrong term 'single album' without distinguishing genres. There is also a document called "single album" in the document about artists such as the US and Japan who use the album separately from the single. If you look at only a few representative documents that are registered on the tree wiki right now, you can clearly see that it is written as a single album.

"In Korea, a single record is often regarded as simply a record with few songs. Singles are not singles and singles, but singles are singles and albums are singles. Singles and singles are singles, singles are singles, and singles are singles. Reflect. [Though difficult to understand or translate coherently with only machine translation, I believe this paragraph is deliberately/humorously highlighting some of what the writer perceives as absurdities or inconsistencies in the Korean concept of "single album".]

"This is because there is no separate single chart in Korea. Because there are no single charts and no album charts, releasing new songs more than singing the songs in the album will be more profitable in the music charts ranking. In addition, if the same song is recorded simultaneously in a single album and a regular album, the sales volume is dispersed, and the music chart is damaged.

"Billboard and other overseas major music charts have separate charts and album charts as of 2010, both reflecting both physical and digital sales volume. This is a lot of misunderstanding because it is different from Korean music chart which is divided into 'sound source chart' and 'music chart'. It is a typical example of misinterpreting the album TOP200 as a music chart with the soundboard chart of the billboard single HOT100. [My interpretation of that somewhat garbled-in-machine-translation sentence: "A typical example of this misunderstanding by Koreans would be misinterpreting the album Top 200 chart as a 'records' chart and the Hot 100 as a 'digital sound' chart."]"

Of course, this source is an anonymous writer on a wiki, not a "reliable source", and to be taken with a grain of salt. But this anonymous editorializing, I think, suggests that even some Koreans perceive or, on the other hand, are confused by some of the same problems we were attempting to untangle in that discussion—and also the inverse, which is that Koreans often misinterpret the western/Billboard-style categorization of releases, just as we initially misunderstood the Korean perspective.

Again, this is my best understanding based on the research I was able to do. I don't speak Korean and I have little knowledge of Korean music/the Korean music marketplace. However, I did arrive at these conclusions based on the dialogue on that page with people who are much more knowledgable, and by consulting as many Korean sources (both in English and Korean) as I could find. I welcome clarification from someone with better knowledge or, especially, better sources.

Final thought: It may even be that, in the long run, WikiProject Singles takes jurisdiction of "single albums" from WikiProject Albums—even if they're not the same as "singles", even if they are still best sorted with the Album Infobox—since they are a closer cousin to "singles" than "albums" from an English-language perspective. For me, the key thing is recognizing them as their own category of release, not necessarily sorting them under a particular WikiProject. But honestly whatever people think is best is fine; either option (or even sorting "single album" releases into both projects) would be equally sensible, in my opinion. —BLZ · talk 20:56, 6 February 2019 (UTC)Reply