To confuse things a bit, GEMA is also used heavily in the UK as the record industry had an argument with MCPS and most of the big labels swapped to GEMA in the 1990s. (I read too much of Music Week looking for release dates. Some great articles in there.)
For the UK, Music Week magazine is really useful. I will often dig into those back issues to find exact dates for when something is released and add that data. It is misleading to just have a vague mush of “Europe” to cover the release. Was it really available in Iceland on that same day? Russia?
Yes, but it’s better to be vague than be incorrectly specific. If the full list of countries is known, then it shouldn’t be used. If several European countries are known, but not a full list is known, and it has text like “Made in the E.U.” printed, then the Europe country should be used.
If the pressing is known not to only be for France, yes, then it should be forgotten, unless you have a complete list of countries that could be used in place of Europe. It’s incomplete and redundant in these cases. If there’s multiple pressings all meant for multiple European countries, use Europe for all of them unless you know the exact countries (not just one) that pressing was released in. If the pressings have different rights societies and manufacturing credits to a specific country, then use the particular country it points to.
I disagree with the rest of your post.
You don’t have to wait knowing everything (impossible) before starting setting what you verified first-hand (France).
It’s like if we say don’t upload booklet front cover scan of you have not scanned all pages, first.
Indeed, it is very hard to verify what exact countries should be used for these multiple European country releases. Thus, Europe exists as a release country in the database. Made in the E.U. is indeed not an automatic indication of Europe being the right country, it’s just that releases with that on it tend not to have regional pressing plant variations.
Bad analogy, by the way. Europe + France is more like uploading a scan and then uploading a tiny area of the same cover scan again for no reason.
The release country doc should probably be updated to read “specific country/countries unknown” to prevent confusion in the future, if consensus is to not list individual countries in addition.
perhaps a good stopgap would be to add a section to the annotation similar to the one a-tisket does for digital releases (an example), perhaps no matter which way the release events end up.
for example, something like:
== Confirmed available in ==
* France ([date here])
* Spain ([date here], confirmed by [username here])
* Germany
I have had this debate many times in editing notes, and have been convinced by respected AEs to add countries as we know them. Otherwise we just end up with a vague Europe on everything and that is just plain incorrect. Many people do not take part in this forum so it is hard to get their voices here.
MB should not be removing facts. Especially as release dates are often different in different countries. There are only a few pressing plants in operation across Europe and a UK band will often press something in Germany, but only sell in the UK. This is what the Release Country is for.
I do not understand why people are against facts when we have the situation where a Digital release will list every country it is distributed to. If it can be shown a CD was directly released in a country then MB should be able to show this.
If you don’t want this in your tag data, then you can get Picard to just add Europe.
Discog’s policy is built around their limited interface. MB’s interface is designed to add multiple Release countries and dates.
