Many bandcamp titles include ETI or descriptive info that isn’t really part of the album name, though, like (bonus tracks version) or (remastered). Some bandcamp accounts are managed by a label rather than the artist, too. Some various artists albums also end up with an “artist credit” to the label. So I’m wary of slavish adherence to bandcamp names and artists on the grounds of artist intent.
But it goes against guidelines not to use a colon for subtitles. If the cover art doesn’t have it, we are not supposed to use parenthesis. Most of the time, Wikipedia also has subtitles with colons. I don’t think guidelines should be ignored just because digital stores show it differently. Most of the stores just have their own guidelines they are following. It’s like how Spotify has all ETI after a “-” instead of in parenthesis, many stores always have subtitles in parentheses. I don’t think we should change our guidelines to fit theirs. We wouldn’t do that for physical releases, so I don’t we should for digital either.
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In cases I’m seeing it’s just MusicBrainz doing it ‘differently’. If it’s inconsistent across stores/marketing material/artist statements then the standardization is great, but when it’s the same everywhere except MB…
I’m not going to vote no on someone changing it to have a colon, I will respect any guidelines there, but I would rather import some titles 1:1 myself for now.
It’s not a lost cause though, it can totally be solved by alternate tracklists and/or subtitle fields 
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but we already have guidelines for exactly this situation ? and imo “(remastered)” definitely is part of the title if that’s what the artist wrote
then replace “artist intent” with “label intent”. not sure how it’s very different. that’s what the person/people releasing the song wanted it to be titled on people’s devices.
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Just as a side note…MB is not writing about title/songs (except for reviews)…so using " or ’ does not apply. Those rules are for actual papers, discussions, or reviews…not the album music listing of songs. Same holds true for italics unless it is what the artist used (of course, classical is different) and I’m no expert on that. Also, musical programs have their own punctuation/grammar rules. Even Discographies have their own rules on how each album should be listed and what information comes after the title. So MB needs to think about the context of what the purpose is…listing albums with the songs…not writing. Therefore, no specific rules exist for “” , (), or : which means you need to go back to the rules I have listed on my original posting.
These are definitely not equivalent; there are plenty of cases where a label has handled something differently than the artist intended or wanted. But at least in the cases I’m thinking of, they seem to fall within the scope of these discussions:
Naming of deluxe edition releases - MusicBrainz Picard - MetaBrainz Community Discourse
But we’re pretty far afield from the original post. I might make a new post about it, if I find the time.
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Yeah I’ve been doing the same too for years - not only cover art having the final say, but also trying to find the physical back covers for support. Especially that I find mistakes in the artist’s/label’s own Bandcamp listings quite often (the most recent example: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/86989770). Not to mention other digital stores, these are secondary to artist’s own output for me.
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MusicMetadataStyleGuide-MusicBiz-FINAL2.0.pdf
Music industry standard…check the soundtrack section.
Also, just found out the music industry standard uses The Chicago Manual of Style:
The Chicago Manual of Style
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@reosarevok So, is this problem going to get fixed? I need to know if I’m going to continue entering information.
We’re unlikely to drop our guidelines developed over 20 years of community input to start following a metadata guide developed by somebody else, if that’s what you mean. If you think some specific sections of that document would be an improvement on specific sections of our guidelines, propose them separately and the community can debate it (but I think it’s unlikely we’ll change how we deal with extra track information, that’s something that has already seen plenty of discussion).
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Well, you know the old saying “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. It’s a shame to see a company that doesn’t want to change when evidence is provided on what is being done is completely wrong and won’t change! Good luck in your future endeavors!
I can’t quite tell what it is you want done. Your OP talks about people incorrectly capitalizing a subtitle. The whole MB collaborative environment is an attempt to combat that. Certainly it’s not perfect, and mistakes slip through. Look at how many times “Come On Eileen” has gone back and forth with “Come on Eileen.”
So what is your suggestion for minimizing “edit wars?”
Actually, it’s really simple! Anything within parentheses follows the six rules I originally listed. Not only does that follow proper grammar rules it will match what the music industry is using. What ports over from the user scripts we should use because that is what the music industry wants it too for album titles/song titles (of course, the usual changes like additional artists,etc. still apply we do).
Actually these rules are supposed to be followed on MB if the part in brackets is a proper title. The only exception is English language ETI (stuff like “remix”, “radio edit”) which is written as in “normal” sentences (i.e. lower case for most words).
I admit that it’s a bit weird, especially as other languages do not have special capitalization rules for ETI on MB. Maybe someone else who’s been around longer than me can give us a link to an explanation why we have this exception?
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I admit that it’s a bit weird, especially as other languages do not have special capitalization rules for ETI on MB.
Title case is almost exclusive to English, so the need to state explicitly that ETI follows different rules was probably not as strong in other languages. Plus quite frequently English ETI is used even in non-English titles.
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So you’re asking that the MB guideline calling for title capitalization “as if the parentheses do not exist” be changed? As far as I can tell, that’s the only disagreement between the MB guidelines and what you’re asking for.
But the problem you mentioned in your OP was that people weren’t following the guidelines. We could discuss, fix, and reiterate the guidelines all day long, but if the people who aren’t aware of them remain unaware of them, the problem hasn’t been addressed.
So, when you ask if “this problem” is going to be fixed, are you expecting MB to fix that one guideline, or to come up with a way to prevent people from misapplying them?
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An online community like this is very different from a “company”.
The guidelines here did not came from thing air, and they are constantly under discussion and they do change. As you can see above there has been quite some discussion about the issue you raised. So far nothing has been proven wrong.
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