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 is mandatory. It describes the day on which the album was first sold in stores. It can consist of a year only (1980), a month in a year (1980-03), or a specific day (1980-03-20).
• The ReleaseCountry optional (you can set it to "unknown coutry"). This is not the country where the album was produced, but the country where it hit the sotres on that specific ReleaseDate. 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.

Wolrdwide

For example for internet releases or if a global distributor really releases an album in most of the world on the same das (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. "Eourope" 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.

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Justification

There are two alternatives to this system. The first is to add a number of common distribution regions to the list of countries. This would be a nice way to more accurately represent the reality of how the album was distributed. However, it has the following drawbacks:

• There has to be some limit to which sets of countries get represented. Distributors are able to choose any random combination of countries for their release, and this means there will be lots of edge cases. While there may never be a release that covers only Germany, Peru, and New Zealand, there will still be too many to practically put them all in a drop-down list. Someone will need to make continual policy decisions as to which get included, and since this is SubjectiveData, it will just cause arguments and antagonism. ISO 3166 is in some ways an arbitrary selection, but it's someone else's selection, and one from a respected authority.
• Maintaining the list of sets of countries will be an unnecessary maintenance burden.
• Our list of countries won't match those of other people's. For example, the ID3 people might add a "country of origin" tag to their specification. If they did so, chances are they would use ISO 3166 for the reasons above. But if they did, while we use our own selection, then it would be more work to translate MusicBrainz data into ID3 tags.

The second option is to add a separate release for every country that the release covers. This will cause systematic replication of data. Replication of data is bad because the data can become inconsistent, it's harder to modify the data when better information comes along, and it's a greater burden for people entering the data in the first place. It also makes it harder to design a web page to convey the "essential facts" about an album.

The European Union

The European Union is currently not represented as a separate country, but this could change in future. The European Union should be used where 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.

Note that an album might, for example, have one release in the UK, followed by a second wider release that covers the whole of the EU, including the UK.

Justification

The European Union, as with most things, is a special case. Commercial distribution tends to be much more fluid within its borders than between any other sets of countries, and so it's harder to nail down a single country of release. What's more, "EU" is in ISO 3166, so it really should be added anyway.

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.

Enhancements

We know that this system is not ideal. In the future MusicBrainz should be able to store Labels, Catalog IDs and other informatioin. 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.