Cancelled is to be used for a planned official release that was cancelled before being released, but for which enough information is known to still confidently list it (e.g. it was available for preorder).
Examples:
命の花 was cancelled in the wake of the Great Hanshin Earthquake.
GOLDEN☆BEST was cancelled after the artists arrest.
Erotica was cancelled because of potentially controversial imagery.
The masters for [New Mexico demo] were lost, but later released in a compilation.
just a heads up, I’ve put in an edit to change the name of the Five Iron Frenzy example (#4) to “[New Mexico demo]”, since that’s a bit more descriptive, and would better disambiguate from their second demo which got released (or their released first demo )
An amusing case here is that it seems that Madonna release was officially cancelled, but some already printed versions made it out? I wonder whether those are then a separate bootleg release? (clearly, if the files were leaked and then put out by a bootleg company it’d be a bootleg, but IIUC the idea here is that the meant-to-be-official discs were stolen/leaked instead of destroyed?)
Ah, that’s a great point, I didn’t even check if the examples were in MusicBrainz as ‘cancelled’! Derp!
If we change most of the Madonna releases to ‘bootleg’ this might be too confusing an example to have for ‘cancelled’. Or we make them ‘cancelled’. I can’t really decide either…
From what I remember reading on Discogs, discs were already pressed by the time the cancellation was issued, and most were destroyed. Someone must have managed to smuggle a few out onto the collectors’ circuit from there.
I misunderstood this discussion and went and set all the Erotica releases to bootleg, but then realised that it was only the picture disc that was cancelled, so undid it…
If anyone wants to duplicate the cancelled LP and create a bootleg one, go for it, but that seems like needless duplication to me. I’m happy with how it is, and I think it make sense in a practical sense (if someone owns a ‘cancelled’ release we can assume that it’s bootleg, but this assumption doesn’t work the other way round).
)
