Label Annotation

Label > Annotation

• 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!

A Label Annotation is user contributed text attached to a specific Label.

The content of a Label Annotation can be edited by any MusicBrainz user. Like the rest of the database, if something is incorrect or incomplete you can fix it. All changes are recorded and if someone deletes or defaces the Annotation, you can easily restore a previous copy.

Suggested Content

The Label Annotation can hold information about a label that does not fit into the fields of the database.

The following uses are suggested:

• Trivia:
  • Prestige was known as "The Junky Label"

• Textual historical facts:
  • Debut catalog was offered to Fantasy Records by Charles Mingus as a "wedding present"

• Additional disambiguation: identically named labels are usually distinguished thanks to a short label comment. Sometimes, though, it may be useful to provide additional information, or special warnings.
  • There are at least four different Dial Records, and you should be extra careful when deciding to which you attribute a release.

• Miscellaneous editing warnings or informations:
  • BYGActuel is correct and should not be modified to Actuel

• Additional comment about the state of the informations attached to the label entry:
  • Badly lacking historical information about Bird Notes. If you have some information, please provide them or drop a mail to editor dmppanda

• To do list: list of pending work, draft, data fragments awaiting to be properly added. You should use the word TODO, as to make your list easily find-able via a search on annotations.
• Open issues to resolve: if you think something is wrong, but you're not sure or don't want to fix it yourself, you can write a short note to warn others about it. You may use the word FIXME before your note.
• Data that can't fit in the fields of the database, but should, due to a current technical limitation: we actually have no way to specify non continuous multiple periods of activity for a label.
  • Blue Note went dormant during the late 70s, before it was revived during the 80s.

Content you mustn't add

You mustn't add copyrighted content copied from other resources, be they online or printed. More generally, you really shouldn't copy/paste any kind of content, unless it's purely factual.

Label annotation style

At that time there is no official (neither recommended) style for Label Annotations. We may later provide such style indications if there is really a need for them.

Other kind of annotations in MusicBrainz

There are also release annotations and artist annotations. More generally, you may want to read the Annotation FAQ.

Discussion/TODO

• We'll need to update AnnotationType and AnnotationFAQ once the labels go live. -- dmppanda 23:07, 04 November 2006 (UTC)
• The introduction of labels probably predate a good part of the ReleaseAnnotationStyle, that may need to be updated also. -- dmppanda 23:07, 04 November 2006 (UTC)