Capitalization differences between physical and digital releases

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The Ryuichi Sakamoto (坂本龍一) release group BTTB contains 9 releases:

  • 3 16-track CDs from 1999-2000
  • 3 18-track “20th anniversary edition” CDs from 2018-9 (I think they jumped the gun a bit on the anniversary)
  • 2 18-track “20th anniversary edition” digital releases from 2018-9
  • 1 questionable 14-track release

Of these, all but the two digital releases use the normal English rules for title case in their tracklist, e.g. “Opus” and “Do Bacteria Sleep?”. This matches the cover art from one of the original releases, e.g. back/spine and booklet.

The digital releases instead use lowercase for track (but not release) titles. All of the online storefronts and streaming pages that I’ve checked indeed use lowercase:

My inclination is to update the digital releases’ tracklists to follow MB’s English style, as I haven’t found any indication that the lowercasing was the artist’s intent. My (possibly flawed) reading of the edit history is that @jesus2099 already switched the tracklist to English title case in https://musicbrainz.org/edit/58212951, but the lowercase versions were imported again later from online sources.

With that said, https://merurido.jp/item.php?ky=WPCL12924 appears to have a scan of the back of the Warner Music Japan 20th-anniversary CD release, and the track titles are all lowercase there. I’m not sure that this is enough to count as artist intent rather than a choice made by a graphic designer, though.

At the very least, it seems to me that the track titles for all of the 20th-anniversary releases should be consistently capitalized. I’m aware that some people have strong opinions about digital release data, though, so I figured I should ask here before making edits – I’m just trying to keep my playlists from looking ugly. :slight_smile:

Here are some related threads that I read:

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Actually, this isn’t a “physical vs. digital” question, but a Japanese question. Japanese Style is very clear here.

Style / Language / Japanese - MusicBrainz says to leave them lowercase. (And since this is Japanese music, you might want to look at the Japanese version.)

MB’s English style does not apply to Japanese music, per itself.

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Thanks for the reply! I’d seen the Japanese style rule about preserving case in non-Japanese scripts, but I’d missed the part about it also applying to entirely-in-English titles by Japanese artists. That makes me suspect that the Warner Music Japan release should also use lowercase (based on the image I linked to above), but I’ll save that edit for someone who has the CD and feels strongly about this.

And just to mention it, Milan (the US label responsible for all the other 20th-anniversary releases) seems to consistently use lowercase when referring to the song titles online with the exception of “Energy Flow” in https://milanrecords.com/release/ryuichi-sakamoto-bttb-20th-anniversary-edition/, but that’s arguably referring to the original version of the song.

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