Digital releases---original availability or current availability?

MusicBrainz
1

I think my previous post ended up being too long, so some of the questions near the end never really got any attention. Here is one of them:

Suppose a digital release is added to MB and its availability is annotated based on what can be observed at that time. Later we find that the territorial availability has changed—for example, a release that was previously unavailable in Korea becomes available there, or vice versa.

Should the release continue to reflect the “original” availability (not guaranteed to be “initial” availability), or should it be updated to match the current availability?

2

If it wasn’t available in a country at time of release, but it is today and it’s the same release. Add the countries it is today. Do not remove countries that it is no longer available if it was at one time available in that country, but no longer is. It will be nearly impossible on many releases to have true dates for when a release first because available in a country (I’ve done it and it’s very tedious and ultimately changes anyway). So, now, I just add the first date it was available on any service in any country as the release date. Many times the country event will be blank or very small or worldwide. So, annotation is good to show this information.

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3

The logical fit to the current database schema would seem to be:

  1. Add Korea to the MB Release with the date it became available in Korea. This release date intentionally differs from the others.
  2. Remove Korea from the existing Official-status release and add a new MB Release with Withdrawn-status to represent Korea.
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4

The best option will be to be able to set the country and date for the URL itself rather than the whole release but it is what it is.

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