Do the release names of these: https://beta.musicbrainz.org/series/6fc8a10e-5e8d-4a4c-b22d-9c0a38dacb13 need to be amended to remove the series name and (where appropriate) add the composer name?
Unclear. I don’t think we necessarily want to remove all series names, if they’re big enough on the cover to be considered part of the title. But I wouldn’t care much either way.
The composers’ names are already there when appropriate: that is, when the title is “a list of works by different composers” as per the release title guideline. Otherwise, the composer should not be on the title, as per the same guideline 
I think I’d prefer not having them in the title in this case (as long as the information is captured in the Series) as, although they are printed fairly large on the cover, they’re clearly separated from the real title, in a distinct box which seems designed to be less prominent.
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I only ask because I noted that @CatCat had removed Series Names from some BBC Music Magazine CDs as per https://beta.musicbrainz.org/series/5e305b8b-402c-4bc9-9290-146a4a0515fc so I assumed that this was considered “a good idea” as it had not been challenged. I was therefore going to assist in this. It does seem to me that the series name makes the release title unnecessarily cumbersome.
Is the style guideline cast in stone? I’m sure there is a reason for it, but I can’t quite see it. For the series in question, the composer name is always a prominent part of the title on the cover. Personally I don’t mind provided the composer is included in the release artists (not always the case) and because, when it comes to tagging with Picard, I use my Classical Extras plugin to prefix the release with the composer name.
Well, it is until we decide to change it! The reason to generally not have this on the title is that the composer (if important enough for the title) will already be there as an artist instead, which is the same reason we don’t generally put performers in the title The reason we do put it for multi-composer works lists is to avoid having “Violin Concerto no. 1 / Violin Concerto no. 2”, by “Composer 1, Composer 2; Violinist”, which leaves us no obvious way to know which concerto by which violinist this release has.
I generally think it’s a good idea as long as the series name isn’t seen as part of the title (so, to be decided on a case by case basis). The BBC ones seem clearly separate, and as per @obtext’s comment above, I wouldn’t disagree to change it here either (@ListMyCDs.com has worked with this series too IIRC, I’d make sure he thinks it’s ok too before changing stuff). But sometimes it won’t make sense, for example if it’s “The Complete Piano Music, Vol. X” with either nothing more or a huge list of piano pieces on the cover
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A tricky one, then, for “The romantic piano concertos”. If we leave off the composer name and the series name then many off the releases will just be titled “Piano Concertos”, except for the ones where there is more than one composer. It all seems a bit inconsistent to me and I’m not sure what the right answer is. I won’t make any changes unless there is general agreement.
From the series page, most are not just “Piano Concertos”, but the specific concertos (“Piano Concerto no. 2, op. 56 / Piano Concerto no. 3, op. 80”). This seems like a perfectly good title to me!
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It’s typically easier to identify and find these releases when the series name is included on the release title. Series name is part of the title on most of the other databases, stores and streaming services. Some libraries seem to include it but some don’t. I could imagine people searching for something like “The Romantic Piano Concerto, Volume 43” on search engines. Search engines aren’t clever enough to use MB series entity as part of the searches. I’m also pretty sure that other services using MB data don’t use this entity for anything useful yet.
I see no harm done if both, the series name and the works are listed on the title. Typically more data is better than lesser. I don’t typically include longer lists of works (no one would search with these) but when it’s just couple of concertos I see no harm done. For sure this could be seen as duplicating data but at the same time I don’t see it causing any harm or potential confusion. Only argument I could see is “titles are too long” and I’m not sure if that’s a good reason enough to make finding these releases harder.
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Maybe some of those other databases include the series name in the title because they don’t have any other way to record it (i.e. they don’t have the equivalent of ‘series’)?
Behaviour of search engines can be improved, with the right sort of prodding. Shaping the data to fit their current limitations seems like the wrong approach.
Another disadvantage of duplicating the data is that it makes errors and typos more likely.
My 2p.
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That’s most likely the reason. I’m just trying to be practical. Especially with automatic matching between the systems it’s really beneficial if naming follows the similar patterns. It seems that majority of different sources include this series on the title.
We either like new people to easily find our site via search engines or not. Couple of extra words on the title is pretty good compromise. We still encourage everyone to link data with series entities. Little harm done if “titles are too long” and “typos more likely”.
I strongly feel that a series name should not be duplicated into the title. Much the same as not duplicating the label name into the title. Exceptions should be made when the resulting title would be void, or when the series name clearly forms a part of the title (Examples for exceptions: 1, 2).
Also, I think that these kind of style decisions should not be guided by search machine behavior or mimicing other databases.
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Need to clarify that my opinion is only related to discussed “The Romantic Piano Concerto” (Hyperion) series. On releases this series name is printed on the front with bigger font than the listed works. I’m not recommending to include all series names to titles.
Example cover:
I don’t see any reason why the series “The Romantic Piano Concerto” should be an exception.
The series name clearly is not part of the main titles. The individual releases will have well distinguishable names (as discussed above) without including the series name.
An unrelated side note: Someone searching the web for “The romantic piano concerto …” might even end up in the musicbrainz page of the full series and be delighted about the structured info there!
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I would expect most of the people trying to search for “The Romantic Piano Concerto” whether it’s part of the main title or not. There’s no reason for us to blindly follow naming conventions of other databases but if majority of stores sell this as “Romantic Piano Concerto”, libraries catalog it with the same name and magazines write reviews by using it… I guess we know it better 
Sorry for starting this. But I couldn’t resist putting “The romantic piano concerto” into Google. The hyperion website came up first. Then this: https://www.discogs.com/label/219914-The-Romantic-Piano-Concerto - draw your own conclusions. (MusicBrainz was nowhere).
Huh. I was expecting that to be “fifth page” or something, but it seems it’s literally nowhere. @rob, is Google still working on crawling us, or are they ignoring series for some reason? 
They must be indexing the series, because if you search for
“the romantic piano concerto” 6fc8a10e-5e8d-4a4c-b22d-9c0a38dacb13
you find it. But it must be way down the ranks.
Hi!
I just discovered this cleanup, and I’m interested. I tried out on this release: https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDH55345 However, I’m wondering: how do we deal with different releases in a release group? The corresponding release group is https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/f30fb60e-00a3-3ec2-8e31-eb3792f53575, but only the latest of the 3 releases in the group is on their website, should I just skip the others? Discogs has even others: https://www.discogs.com/search/?q=hyperion+partridge+monteverdi&type=all , should we add all the releases that are on discogs?
On this release I have a general question: when should something be related to the album rather than the recording? On this release https://musicbrainz.org/release/ef2449d2-1997-3428-bb75-830cf84d1652 there are a lot of dupes between release and recording relationships, and in the different releases of the relationship group the release relationships differ quite a lot (even some that shouldn’t). Is there a style guide for that? I didn’t find one.
AFAIK all the documentation for relationships is linked from here.
The only problem I see on those releases is that the executive producer isn’t meant to be credited at recording level, only at release level.
When you say the release relationships ‘differ quite a lot’, do you just mean that they cover different things, or that they contradict one another?