History:Label Future

This page should be used to collect the various limitations and bugs of the current label system in MusicBrainz, as well as ideas about how to enhance it and make it evolves toward a better model.

The system currently has known limitations, that may be solved later:

• Ideally, we could be able to attach multiple release events (release date and country) to a unique catalog number / EAN. -- dmppanda 21:22, 03 November 2006 (UTC)
• Also one release event could use multiple labels. For example Inside Out Music records are always distributed by SPV and they have an SPV catalogue number as well as an IO catalogue number. Therefore I think one "release set" should contain: several <release date, release region> pairs, several <label, catalogue number> pairs and single fields such as the EAN (of which the barcode is just the representation, but could leave the name like that as it's easier to identify for users which don't know that). -- Shepard 13:37, 07 January 2007 (UTC)
• ARs such as the DiscogsRelationshipType and the AmazonRelationshipType would ideally be attached to a release set - but I guess that has to wait until we can separate between releases and albums. :) -- Shepard 13:37, 07 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure I understand correctly these last points. How would we allow: on one hand, a single release event (country, date) to be linked to several different label/cat/bar (as in your example), and to single AMZ/Discogs links, and on the other hand, a single release set (single label/cat/bar) to be linked to several different release events and several different AMZ/Discogs links? Though this question is theoretical ;) - Also do you imply that Discogs/AMZ links should be unique to a release set? -- dmppanda 16:15, 07 January 2007 (UTC)
    • Well, one release date could refer to several label releases (ie, different pages on amazon and discogs), and indeed, different release dates could refer to different label releases. Finally, one label release (ie, page on amazon and discogs) could be a release on 2 or more labels (eg http://www.discogs.com/release/374880). I think the best way to to this would be to allow for ARs (specially discogs and amazon ones, perhaps others) specific to release events, but this is probably difficult/impossible. Ultimately I think this will all be easier to deal with when NGS gets here. -- Gecks
    • My initial idea in ReleaseDataSet was to have one set for each unique release (identified by the EAN for example, although sometimes not even they identify a unique release). In this set you would then have a list of <release date, release country> pairs - still for this unique release, because different countries have different days in the week when music is mostly released, so the item with the EAN 1234567890123 could be released on Monday in .de and on Wednesday in the UK for example. Then you would also store a list of <label, cat> pairs, because different labels work on one unique release - as I described in my example above, InsideOut releases are always distributed by SPV and both have their own catalogue system. And then you store other identifiers in this set, like the EAN, Discogs/ASIN stuff (yes, unique to a release set).
      Note though that this page here is about a first step into the right direction. The ideas in ReleaseDataSet are relativised by NGS where the whole tracklisting with titles, tracktimes, DiscIDs and so on would be included in a "release set". So, not everything needs to be coded yet, limitations are implied. One label per release date is a good start. If this was to be extended before labels go live, I would prefer multiple labels per date over multiple dates per label, but that's just a personal preference. -- Shepard 15:22, 09 January 2007 (UTC)

Discuss SpecialPurposeLabel.

Need a small logo for labels.

Open tickets list.