Release groups usage guideline

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Revision as of 10:19, 22 May 2009 by Prodoc (talk | contribs) (Merged duplicate point + minor nitpicks)
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Current Musicbrainz server release feature a concept called Release Groups. Just as the name suggests, it groups several releases together in one entity. Since this is not obviously clear, this page explains the difference and gives some guidelines on how to handle them.

Both release groups and releases are "albums" in colloquial sense, but with a slight difference: a release is something you can buy as media, e.g. a CD box, a vinyl record etc. on its own, while a release group embraces the concept of an album -- it doesn't matter how many CDs or editions/versions it had. When an artist tells you "We've released our new album", he's talking about a release group. When his publisher says "This new album gets released next week in Japan and next month in Europe", he's talking about several releases belonging to the release group the artist has told you about.

Therefore a single release group could contain:

A release group should not consist of:

Musicbrainz automatically considers every release in the database to be part of a release group, even if this group only contains this one release. You don't have to worry about creating release groups, you only ever need to merge them.