-
Improvement
-
Resolution: Unresolved
-
Normal
-
None
-
None
-
None
Many MusicBrainz Releases are being entered with 190-210 release countries, and many users find this data worthless. Given this direction the data is going in, many users are going to find it more useful to store the country of the artist(s), which is currently constrained to a single country per artist. However, this data is not currently included in the webservice results for a release lookup. I think it should be, rather than force clients to make an additional webservice call per artist that appears on the release.
[MBS-12170] Add artist country in release webservice calls
i need the artist country at a similar place.
i want the artist country when fetching events.
but i was looking at the server api code and i think this shouldn't be that difficult to fix (i think)
if the part in the red square would be placed before the "if" it should ALWAYS reply the country + area stuff (also when artist is a relation)
(for me it would be enough if just the orange part is ALWAYS there)
I think OP was looking for the country. In the plugin I created, I made both the country (two-character country code) as well as the location (comma separated text similar to the way it is displayed on MB) available because I had to drill down through the area records anyway to get to the artist's country.
PS: Duh, of course this is the ticket. I must have been thinking this was a PICARD ticket. 
Is this expected to be the artist country or the artist area? Because we don't currently calculate an artist country in MusicBrainz (although I know ListenBrainz does and it is generally possible based on area containment).
Unfortunately, that information isn't supported by the MusicBrainz api. I don't know if there is a ticket for this in the MusicBrainz server project, but until it is supported by the api, there's nothing that can be done in Picard to provide the information any faster. As I mentioned in my pull request, the plugin is a temporary work-around to allow the functionality until it is supported directly by the MusicBrainz api.
The idea behind this request is that it ought to be exponentially faster for the server to load the country(s) from the database in the one webservice call, so that it wouldn't need multiple webservice calls like a plugin currently has to resort to.
The main problem is that this will require additional api calls, which will slow down loading an album from MusicBrainz (in some cases significantly). I've tried to provide this functionality in a new plugin which makes this information availability (along with the associated performance hit) something that the user can optionally install. This is available from my repo on GitHub. I have also initiated a pull request to have this added to the "official" list of Picard plugins. Note the example script at the bottom of the documentation page, which demonstrates how to assign the primary album artist's country code to a metadata tag.
New pull request: https://github.com/metabrainz/musicbrainz-server/pull/3498