Of course tracks exist independently of records - compilation albums consist of (almost) nothing but tracks plucked out of their original home. Tracks on albums may be released as singles etc.
If it is important to keep track (sorry) of multiple appearances of the same track then that's really the obvious way of doing it - having the track as an entity in its own right and linking that track to however many different records it appears on, and using the linking table to store information specifically related to that track's relationship with each release (i.e. primarily the track's ordinal position on that particular record). A perfectly sensible approach, if that's what's trying to be achieved.
In third normal form terms, information such as artist and genre do clearly link with track rather than record - and so long as track equates to recording rather than song it's not going to change from one instance of a specific track to another.
On the other hand, clearly an album may have a genre of its own which is separate from the genres of the individual tracks - think of the old "File under..." exhortations that used appear on the backs of LP sleeves. I'm not saying there isn't a (musical rather than database) relationship between the two but equally not every track on an album has to fit a specific genre in order for an album to be considered 'electronica' or 'hip-hop' or 'jangly guitar pop' or whatever.
With artist too, especially when dealing with a desktop database and therefore a limit on processing power, disk IO etc, there may be a certain pragmatism to noting that the artist of a particular album is 'The Beatles' without having to examine the artists linked to each of a dozen tracks every single time you want to find it out.
If it is important to keep track (sorry) of multiple appearances of the same track then that's really the obvious way of doing it - having the track as an entity in its own right and linking that track to however many different records it appears on, and using the linking table to store information specifically related to that track's relationship with each release (i.e. primarily the track's ordinal position on that particular record). A perfectly sensible approach, if that's what's trying to be achieved.
In third normal form terms, information such as artist and genre do clearly link with track rather than record - and so long as track equates to recording rather than song it's not going to change from one instance of a specific track to another.
On the other hand, clearly an album may have a genre of its own which is separate from the genres of the individual tracks - think of the old "File under..." exhortations that used appear on the backs of LP sleeves. I'm not saying there isn't a (musical rather than database) relationship between the two but equally not every track on an album has to fit a specific genre in order for an album to be considered 'electronica' or 'hip-hop' or 'jangly guitar pop' or whatever.
With artist too, especially when dealing with a desktop database and therefore a limit on processing power, disk IO etc, there may be a certain pragmatism to noting that the artist of a particular album is 'The Beatles' without having to examine the artists linked to each of a dozen tracks every single time you want to find it out.