Label

~+Labels +~

Content:

What is a Record Label?

• -- (derived from Wikipedia's article)

Record labels may refer to:

• Music groups:
  • A music group is a financial holding, whose purpose is solely to control and manage other companies directly involved in the production of sound recordings

• Record companies:
  • A record company manages imprints, and coordinates the production / manufacturing / promotion / relations with artist / PR / distribution of sound recordings. Record labels may directly handle one or more of these aspects, or may sign contractual agreements with other companies to do the job.

• Imprints:
  • An imprint is (strictly, and nothing more than) a brand (and trademark) associated with the marketing of sound recordings (an imprint is not a company). An imprint may be marketed as a project, unit or division of the company that manages it.

MusicBrainz should keep track of imprints, companies involved into either production or distribution, and to some extent music groups. Typically, all these informations are available on the media sleeves.

At that time, we don't think we should keep track of companies involved in the other aspects of the music industry (PR...), get into too much financial details, or try to represent exactly the socio-economic organization of labels. There are two reasons for that:

• such informations are usually not available from sleeves
• they are probably irrelevant to MusicBrainz goal (being a music database)

Record Labels in MusicBrainz

These fields are stored directly in each label's record:

• LabelID: the MusicBrainz UUID of the label (not editable)
• LabelName: the name of the label
• LabelSortName: the sortname of the label
• LabelAlias: aliases
• LabelCode: the unique code of the label (a.k.a. "LC")
• LabelBeginDate: this is the creation date of the label entity (or the date at which the imprint name was first used)
• LabelEndDate: this is the date at which the company went bankrupt, was dismantled, or the name was used for the last time
• LabelComment: field to distinguish between identically named labels
• LabelAnnotation: general information about the label that may be of interest and doesn't fit in any other fields
• LabelCountry: the country in which the company was founded
• LabelType: the "type" of the label, describing its production

Many other kinds of information can be represented using AdvancedRelationships. You can read AdvancedRelationshipTypes for informations on all kind of relationships, or more specifically check LabelRelationshipClass for label centric informations.

Just like with artists, you can subscribe to a label. See LabelSubscription for more information.

Editing labels

Any MusicBrainz user can edit labels in several ways:

• The system provides the following EditTypes:
  • AddLabelEdit (autoedit)
  • EditLabelNameEdit
  • EditLabelSortnameEdit
  • AddLabelAnnotationEdit
  • AddLabelAliasEdit
  • EditLabelAliasEdit
  • RemoveLabelAliasEdit
  • MergeLabelsEdit

For general informations about these edits (and other types of edit), see EditType.

More about labels

The design of the label system has been made bearing in mind one main requirement: having a release sleeve as only information source must be enough to perform all basic editing.

That being said, the label macrocosm is a very rich and complex world. Editors who want to go beyond basic editing and want to learn/document more can take a look at the LabelResource page.

F.A.Q.

How to handle autoreleases?

In some cases, artists "autoproduce" and "autorelease" their own records. As long as an imprint is possible to positively identify, it should be used as a label entry. If there's no such thing, or if the creation of such a label entry is disputable, we may want to use SpecialPurposeLabels (possibly [autorelease]). This need to be discussed further, and such an addition should be made after a proper RFC/RFV process.

Can an imprint and the company that controls it have the same name?

Yes, definitely. Actually, a company "A" may sell its own imprint "A" to another company "B" and continue to exist as company "A", while the imprint is being operated by company "B"... This can result in really confusing situations... Usually though, editors in MusicBrainz will deal with imprints exclusively (which *is* the information available on sleeves).

In the old days, there was actually no clear distinction between an imprint and the company that controlled it. Nowadays though, things got much more complex. Whether or not something requires two distinct entries in the database is up to the editor, and should be decided on a case by case basis (though we think that in most cases, just one entry is enough).

Where to discuss problems and enhancements suggestions?

Both discussions about future enhancements and current limitations and bugs should be done on the LabelFuture page.

Are "collections" valid imprints?

This is a difficult question that can't be solved generally, but only on a case by case basis. Hence, the use of a label entry for collections names must be made with extra-care. Definitely, one must not use collection names printed on the front cover as a label name, but only if the collection name is used in place of the label name (usually on the back cover, next to a catalog number), and is really used by the producing label as is. For example, the "Verve Jazz Masters" releases are from label "Verve", dot, and "Jazz Masters" should be part of the release name. On the other hand, "Original Jazz Classics" is an imprint, owned by label "Fantasy".

How do you "relate" a label and a release?

When adding a ReleaseEvent, you can additionally specify a LabelName, ReleaseCatalogNumber, and an EAN. This is a core relation between labels and releases (not to be confused with AdvancedRelationships). At that time, there are no AdvancedRelationships between labels and releases.

Discussion

Open questions and miscellaneous discussions that don't yet have a place in the F.A.Q. and doesn't belong to LabelFuture should go to the LabelDiscussion page. Alternatively, you can post your question to either the UsersMailingList or StyleMailingList, and possibly edit one of these pages afterward with the result if you think it's of general interest.