Digging up this thread because I was just pinged for marking a release as ‘Europe’ and I’m trying to understand it better. I agree that Musicbrainz should not remove facts and should aim to have the highest quality data, but it’s all a learning experience. Everyone is here because they love music and collecting it, and most editors are just trying to include the most accurate data, but that is perhaps not always clearly defined.
To draw a comparison for the ‘Europe’ label, there are many releases that are released and marketed as ‘worldwide’ from the label - increasingly for CDs nowadays for smaller artists, as they make a limited amount of sales and can only justify one pressing run worldwide. It would make little sense to add a release event for an editor’s specific country anytime they found a worldwide release in their local record store - all that would achieve would be to fill the database with detritus.
There are also many releases that labels manufacture and market to ‘Europe’, complete with cataogue ID and label stating ‘Europe’, yet people insist on doing the same for those releases?
I think that the release country information only makes sense in the traditional interpretation of ‘where was the label issuing this release to - i.e. the primary market’ (a specific and definable answer the issuer assigns), not ‘where did you buy this record from’ (a variable and changing answer the issuer and label have no control over, which I doubt Musicbrains intends to document).
It seems like that point is the fundamental disagreement here?
If that’s the case we could seek advice from the MB overlords as to better define / clarify?
I see other threads discussing the same eg Country is