Label

Labels

• Status: Warning! This is a working draft for the discussion going on the style mailing list: http://lists.musicbrainz.org/pipermail/musicbrainz-style/2006-November/004038.html. It's not official in any way!

What is a Record Label?

• -- heavily inspired by Wikipedia

"Record label" has multiple meanings:

• 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 / enforcement of copyright protection / 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...), or get into too much financial details. 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)

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 discutable, we may want to use SpecialPurposeLabels (possibly [autorelease]).

Information about labels stored in the database

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

• LabelID: the UUID of the label (not editable)
• LabelName: the name of the label
• LabelCode: the unique code of the label
• LabelBeginDate: this is the creation date (or "first used name" date) of the label entity
• 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 to other users
• LabelCountry: the country in which the company was founded
• LabelType: the "type" of the label

Possibly also:

• LabelSortname
• LabelAlias

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.

Editing labels

Any MusicBrainz user can edit labels in several ways:

• The system provides the following EditTypes:
  • AddLabelsEdit (autoedit)
  • RemoveLabelEdit
  • EditLabelEdit
  • MergeLabelsEdit

Informative external resources about labels

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The following sites are useful to find labels homepages:

• http://www.rlabels.com/
• http://www.allrecordlabels.com/

Wikipedia has an extensive labels list, and a lot of articles:

• Wikipedia labels list page

Genre oriented resources:

• Jazz:
  • Scott Yanow label page: usefull for a quick heads-up about some labels
  • Michael Fitzgerald label page: has a *lot* of catalogs (although not really detailed)
  • The jazz discography project has not a lot of labels catalogs, but when they have one, it's good!

Global market share overview:

• There are mainly "4 big ones": Universal Music Group, EMI Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony BMG who own a vast majority of all other labels.

Known problems and limitations

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)

Discussion

• The use of a label entity 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 printed in place of the label name, and is really used by the producing label as is. For example, any of the "Verve Jazz Masters" releases are from label Verve, dot, and "Jazz Masters" should be part of the release name. Compare this with the Original Jazz Classics releases, by label Fantasy. -- dmppanda 21:22, 03 November 2006 (UTC)

• Although... it's somewhat an interesting side-effect to be able to use phony labels as collection names...

• How should artists that release their own stuff be handled? Create a label page for the artist? (I know of several autoreleasers within the Danish folk music milieu alone.) --FrederikSOlesen Template:DateTime
  • I guess it boils down to: does a legal entity (association, company, whatever) exists, and does the media bears a barcode? If so, then *this* (whatever *this* is) is the "label" (even if owned by the artist, even if nothing more than a trademark name to which the barcode has been attributed. If not, then I guess we are dealing with people distributing CDr around, out of any kind of structure (be it commercial or legal), right? In this case, IMO there is no label at all (and possibly no release event either). Probably the same goes for "internet" releases out of any "official" structures. Wether we want a "phony" label (or more than one?) to distinguish between such "autorelease" and "no-info-yet-release" is an open question. -- dmppanda 08:47, 07 November 2006 (UTC)
  • I rewrote the introduction of this page, in the hope it clarifies things a bit. -- dmppanda 13:34, 07 November 2006 (UTC)