Difference between revisions of "Label"

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=== Name ===
=== Name ===
The official name of the label.
The official name of the label.

The label name should be represented as found on media sleeves, including use of characters from non latin charsets, stylized characters, etc.

If a label is renamed a new label should be created and a [[Label Rename Relationship Type|label rename relationship]] created between the two.

If there exists multiple slightly different names for the label (eg: ''The Verve Music Group'', ''Verve Music Group'', ''VMG''), you should use the most commonly used name, or the one used on the label's official site.

Labels are not always named uniquely, and different labels may share the same label name. To help differentiate between identically named labels, you should use a [[Disambiguation Comment|disambiguation comment]] and possibly an [[Annotation|annotation]] as well.


=== Sort name ===
=== Sort name ===

Revision as of 19:53, 3 April 2012

Template:LabelHeader Labels are one of the most complicated and controversial part of the music industry. The main reason for that being that the term itself is not clearly defined and refers to at least two overlapping concepts: imprints, and the companies that control them. Fortunately, in many cases the imprint and the company controlling it have the same name.

What is a label?

Imprint

Labels in MusicBrainz refer mainly to 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. Imprints are the information you certainly want to add in the database and is the information available on sleeves in the form of a label logo (a.k.a. imprint). Imprints are labels, as one usually understand it. Specifically, you should favor using names as they are represented on the imprint, rather than using a company name (usually found in "copyright"/"produced" mentions).

Record company

To a lesser extent, a label entity may be created in the database to represent a record company.

A record company typically manages imprints, and coordinates the production / manufacturing / promotion / relations with artist / PR / distribution of sound recordings. Record companies may directly handle one or more of these aspects, or may sign contractual agreements with other companies to do the job. In some specific cases, you may want to create a label in the database to represent such a company name rather than an imprint: usually, such a move is required when labels went through complex merge/split operations and you need Advanced Relationships to structure the imprints list and represent their history in a meaningful way. Please note, though, that there is no need to "de-duplicate" companies from imprints when their name are very close.

Music group

Lastly, we also store music groups.

A music group is a financial holding company, whose purpose is solely to control and manage other companies directly involved in the production of sound recordings. For record companies, the use of Music groups is reserved for specific cases that you will likely not encounter unless you're doing some research intensive background work on structuring the labels list.

Others

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

  • this information is usually not available from sleeves
  • this information is irrelevant to the MusicBrainz goal of being the ultimate source of music information
  • such a project would be extremely complicated and our current data model is not fit for it

There are several entities that are not correct labels for which we still keep an entry so we can stop people from adding releases to them. You can find a list of them here.

Examples

Style guidelines

Please see the guidelines for labels

Label properties

Name

The official name of the label.

The label name should be represented as found on media sleeves, including use of characters from non latin charsets, stylized characters, etc.

If a label is renamed a new label should be created and a label rename relationship created between the two.

If there exists multiple slightly different names for the label (eg: The Verve Music Group, Verve Music Group, VMG), you should use the most commonly used name, or the one used on the label's official site.

Labels are not always named uniquely, and different labels may share the same label name. To help differentiate between identically named labels, you should use a disambiguation comment and possibly an annotation as well.

Sort name

A variant of the name. The guidelines for sort names can sometimes be tricky, see the style guidelines for reference.

Label Code

The label code is the "LC" code of the label.

Type

The type describes the main activity of the label.

Alias

The aliases are used to store alternate names or mispellings.

Begin and end dates

See the page about dates for more information.

Country

The country of origin for the label.

MBID

See the page about MBIDs for more information.

Disambiguation comment

See the page about comments for more information.

Annotation

See the page about annotations for more information.

Additional information

Template:LabelFooter