Style/Titles/Subtitles
Style for separate parts of an release title
Use a colon (:) to separate multi-line parts of a ReleaseTitle.
If there is an alternative dividing punctuation mark such as the question mark (?) or exclamation point 
, use that mark instead of the colon.
- This is an OfficialStyleGuideline.
Example
Take an example from Etta James:
- Tell Mama: The Complete Muscle Shoals Sessions
Or from Faith No More:
- Who Cares a Lot? Greatest Hits
Or from Spock's Beard:
- Don't Try This @ Home Either! From the Vaults, Series 3
Rationale
The covers of CDs and LPs are generally full color printed squares. This allows designers to use text color, position and size to indicate what is a title or subtitle. Converting that to a single line of text for display on your iPod or in WinAmp requires adding something to separate or differentiate the different parts of the title. Various people have come up with different solutions to this e.g. put the subtitle in brackets, square brackets, after a comma, a dash etc. Eventually the MusicBrainz database will be able to support sub-titles as a field in their own right and this will allow the user to choose how to display them (even giving them the option to ignore them completely) but until then we needed an agreed format to standardise on.
Note
Discussion
It is acceptable to use the colon to seperate extra sub-titles, i.e.:
Bug Swamp: The Complete Bug Hits: 1987-1990 (fictional title). --TarragonAllen
Please note this is only a guideline for use on ReleaseTitles and not for general use on all titles. Additionally, it only applies to multi-line titles. --TarragonAllen
So what guideline applies to TrackTitles? IIRC works and parts of works (like movements in symphonies) can be separated by colons according to the ClassicalStyleGuide. So it seems to me that the guideline separate SubTitles by a colon (:) is somewhat of a GeneralSylePrinciple. I would prefer to say that applying this principle to TrackTitles is a bit more tricky, and that people should look at the ClassicalStyleGuide for this. --DonRedman
Authors: Original by NeilCafferky (based on IRC and mailing list discussion), re-written for the wiki by TarragonAllen with help from DonRedman, and an example contributed by derGraph.
