Big Machine Label Group

[Kid_Devine]

OK, I wouldn’t recommend merging any of these right now, although I understand why you might want you. There are a couple of unresolved issues with the way we handle labels that are relevant here.

1. Many of the releases on these labels are from iTunes. iTunes releases often list a holding company (such as Big Machine Records, LLC) as the copyright holder. There’s disagreement as to whether such holding companies should be used to fill out the release label field, they often are, but this complicates things as holding companies are not used as release labels on physical releases. There’s a ticket STYLE-563 related to this.

2. If some of these labels are merged there would be some data loss, for example if you merged Big Machine Records, LLC into Big Machine Records the “LLC” part would be lost. Also see this thread for prior discussions on this issue.

Merge two labels?

I would personally, as an editor, prefer to withhold this kind of merges until MBS-8948 has been implemented, as it will be hard to “fix” any labels that have already gotten merged before this and thus do not retain their “credit” as part of the merge. (Ie., we lose data by merging now as opposed to merging after MBS-8948.)

So I expect some of these labels may be merged at some point in the future, but I wouldn’t do it right now.