Release Style

Style Guideline for Releases

• Status: This is a ProposedStyleGuideline that should supercede ReleaseCountryStyle.

A Release is the event when an Album is first sold on a market. In MusicBrainz we describe a Release by a ReleaseDate and a ReleaseCountry.

• The ReleaseDate describes the day on which the album was first sold in stores. This is not necessarily the production year (that one which you find on the sleeve as (p) 1979). The release date is mandatory. It can consist of a year only (1980), a month in a year (1980-03), or a specific day (1980-03-20).

• ReleaseDate is mandatory? What if they don't know it? --Gecks

• The ReleaseCountry describes the country where the album hit the stores on that specific ReleaseDate. It is not the country where the album was produced. The country is optional (you can set it to "unknown country"). See below for the intricate details.

An album can have several pairs of ReleaseCountry and ReleaseDate, that each describe one release.

Details of the Release Country

When adding a release date to an album, you have to choose the country. The list of countries you can choose from is taken from ISO 3166, which is a widely-used standard list of countries.

Do not use the release country to describe the country in which the album was produced, or from which the artist originates.

For each country in which the album was released, add a new release date, alongside the name of the country.

This creates some problems:

Composite Release Areas

Not all record distributors stick to national boundaries when they define the regions in which they release an album.

Albums are often released in more than one country at the same time. For example, some albums state that they are distributed in "Australasia" (presumably Australia and New Zealand) or the "Benelux" (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg). In these cases it is OK, to add one release, and simply choose one of the countries to represent the entire release area. For example:

• Choose the band's home country. Shihad is a New Zealand band; if they release an album in Australasia, add it as a New Zealand release.
• Where this information is unknown or ambiguous, record the country with the largest sales.

Fuzzy Release Areas

MusicBrainz also has some fuzzy release areas:

Unknown Country

If you cannot find the country, but know the ReleaseDate, use this so that the date can be added to MusicBrainz.

Worldwide

For example for internet releases or if a global distributor really releases an album in most of the world on the same date (which should be extremely rare, though).

Europe

Trade within the EU is so open that it can be really difficult to figure out in which European country an album was released. "Europe" offers a fuzzy first guess, that can be changed later on, if someone finds the information. Do not use this simply because it says "produced in the EU" on your CD!

Staggered Releases in Different Areas

Another common phenomenon is that, even when an album is released more-or-less simultaneously in many countries, in fact the releases are slightly staggered. For example, an album might be released on a Sunday in the US, but on Monday in Europe. I have no suggestion for what approach would be best in this situation.

The European Union

The European Union is currently not represented as a separate country, but this could change in future. Right now you should use the fuzzy 'country' "Europe" if an album is distributed in a large proportion of the EU countries simultaneously.

Where only a small number of EU countries are covered, for example UK and Ireland, or just the Scandinavian countries, use the previous strategy of simply choosing one representative country.

Historical Countries

There is currently no ability to enter the names of historical countries, such as the USSR, as a release country. It has been proposed that we should add the countries from ISO 3166-3 to allow this. A couple of those will be added soon.

Enhancements

We know that this system is not ideal. In the future MusicBrainz should be able to store Labels, Catalog IDs and other information. But there is other much more pressing stuff for CurrentWork, so that this will have to wait a bit. There will be a much more detailed representation of releases in the ObjectModel of NadelnderBambus.