History:Soundtrack Title Style Proposal

From MusicBrainz Wiki
Jump to navigationJump to search


Status: This page describes an active style guideline proposal and is not official.



Proposal number: RFC-54
Champion: BrianFreud
Current status: In development


Trac ticket # 2146

A soundtrack should be given the same title as the film (or other production) it is from unless it has a distinctly different title. The soundtrack should be given the ReleaseAttribute "soundtrack".

The title should exclude secondary information such as "Original Soundtrack", "Music from or Inspired by" or "OST", etc, except when

  • it is clearly part of the title of the soundtrack and
  • it is required to distinguish the release from other variations of the soundtrack.

When "O.S.T." or similar abbreviations are to be retained in titles, the preference is to expand abbreviations to their full wording to avoid ambiguity and to help with translation efforts at a later time. (This is in contradiction to AbbreviationStyle which says "OST" should not be expanded.)

Secondary information that is to be excluded will mostly look like a sub-title as per SubTitleStyle.

"Soundtrack" is a single word, and should never be spelt out as "Sound Track" without good reason. For example, the OST of FFVII is called "Final Fantasy VII: Original Sound Track" whereas the OST of FFVIII is called "Final Fantasy VIII: Original Soundtrack", as clearly indicated on the packaging.

Example

"Titanic: Music from the Motion Picture" would become simply "Titanic".

"Memento: Music for and Inspired by the Film" would become simply "Memento".

"Passion" (Peter Gabriel's soundtrack for the film "The Last Temptation of Christ") would remain "Passion"; an annotation noting what film the soundtrack is from would be appropriate.

"Cowboy Bebop O.S.T. 1" would be expanded to "Cowboy Bebop Original Soundtrack 1". The reasoning here is that the "O.S.T. 1" is clearly not secondary information in this case, it's a distinct part of the title, and should be retained as such.

"Last Exile O.S.T." and "Last Exile O.S.T. 2" would become "Last Exile Original Soundtrack" and "Last Exile Original Soundtrack 2"; again, this is not secondary information and is required to distinguish these two releases from each other. Converting "Last Exile O.S.T. 2" to "Last Exile 2" would give the incorrect impression that the soundtrack is for "Last Exile 2" rather than being the second in a series of soundtracks for "Last Exile". This case is closely related to VolumeNumberStyle.

The movie "Batman Forever" has a various artists release and a score, so there are two releases "Batman Forever: Music From the Motion Picture" and "Batman Forever: Original Motion Picture Score" because the subtitles are on the cover too.