ADR-0041: An Artist’s First Album Is Their First Studio Album, Counted in MusicBrainz

Context

A request to play “Van Halen’s first album” has to become the names ADR-0040 plays an album by: the artist, and the album’s title, as the iTunes library writes them. The library cannot be asked which albums it has. Something else has to know the order of an artist’s albums.

Options considered

The owner’s Discogs collection. It knows what the owner has, but on vinyl: the CDs and downloads in iTunes are not in it, and its earliest record by an artist is the first the owner bought a copy of, not the band’s first.

Deezer’s list of an artist’s albums. No call limit, and it is already asked for covers. It does not say which albums are live or compilations, and lists each edition as its own album.

MusicBrainz’s release groups for the artist. Each is typed (album, single, live, compilation, soundtrack) and dated by its first release, and the API can leave out groups that only bootlegs belong to. One call a second, as for ADR-0038.

Decision

An artist’s Nth album is the Nth of their studio albums by first release, as MusicBrainz lists them, with the names straightened toward a library’s.

• The artist is MusicBrainz’s whose name or alias is the one heard, letters and digits alike: “acdc” is AC/DC; “Van Halen” is not “Edward Van Halen”, and a tribute band is not the band. Its name as MusicBrainz writes it is the one sent, since a library is likelier to have it.
• A studio album is a release group of type Album with no secondary type, credited to the artist alone, with at least one official release (release-group-status=website-default). One with no date comes last.
• Counted from 1, and from the newest with a negative number: “latest” is -1.
• Names are written as a library writes them: straight quotes for MusicBrainz’s curly ones (“Guns N’ Roses”), and an untitled album without the brackets MusicBrainz puts around it (“Led Zeppelin IV”).
• An artist’s list is read whole and held for as long as the program runs, every page of it: MusicBrainz lists release groups in no order, a hundred at a time. A miss is held too.

internal/resolve has it as Originals.Discography, beside ADR-0038’s lookups and under the same one-call-a-second gate. cmd/discography ARTIST [N] asks it by hand.

Consequences

• A first request for an artist takes a few seconds: an artist and one or two pages, a second and a half apart. A second request for the same artist asks nothing.
• Some counts are not the one a person means. MusicBrainz types A Hard Day’s Night and Help! as soundtracks, and counts the American Beatles albums as albums of their own: “the Beatles’ third album” is Introducing… The Beatles. Half-live albums such as Ummagumma count as studio albums. A miscount plays the wrong record, by the artist asked for.
• The title is MusicBrainz’s, not the library’s. Where they differ (“Van Halen II” against “Van Halen 2”), nothing plays, and the driver says so (ADR-0040).
• MusicBrainz is asked for more, counted with its other calls (ADR-0027).

What would settle it

Tested against a stand-in for MusicBrainz: studio albums alone, in order, across pages; the artist by its exact name and not a member’s or a tribute’s; a discography read once; names straightened.

Asked of MusicBrainz on 2026-10-24: Aerosmith’s first is Aerosmith (1973), Van Halen’s Van Halen (1978), “acdc”’s High Voltage, Led Zeppelin’s fourth Led Zeppelin IV, Guns N’ Roses’ first Appetite for Destruction, the Beatles’ latest Let It Be.

Not yet shown:

• An album named this way, played by play_album, for an artist whose name and album differ: Guns N’ Roses’ first, Appetite for Destruction, which the library writes Appetite For Destruction, played from “Welcome To The Jungle” on 2026-10-24 (CHG-0033).
• How often the library’s title differs from MusicBrainz’s, over the owner’s own requests.