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!

Labels in MusicBrainz are used to describe the following entities:

a holding company: a company controlling a number of other labels (mainly the four big ones: EMI Group, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony BMG)
a distribution company: a company distributing releases for other labels in specific countries (ZYX)
a production label: a company producing releases (Sire Records)
a subdivision, a subsidiary (or in some rare cases a collection name) (Original Jazz Classics)

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:

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.

Any MusicBrainz user can edit labels in several ways:

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The following sites are useful to find labels homepages:

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

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.

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)

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)