How do you find out where your album was released?

That says (Chatsworth, California) and NOT (Chatsworth, Canada) Nice catch Ivan!

if you think it is US only the what is the point of saying disrupted in Canada. y would steve green not say usa if it was released in the usa it is not adding up to me then you can also see his albums change over time to say disrupted in usa

@highstrung picked up on it first. That mob over there on the Left Side of the Pond forget that the rest of the world don’t know what all their states are. And it is a puzzle to me why the MB TLA translator is saying California or Canada. How often is Canada shortened in that manner? Weird.

It shows he is focusing on North America. And clearly is sending box loads North of the border.

I do also get a bit confused with the language. It is Released in one place, and the various lorries take box loads of the product and Distribute them into other areas. As that crosses the border into Canada a different company takes over. That is then a Canadian company Distributing (Shipping) a USA Release.

Distributor = Truck.

The important bit is when Steve Green announced the release. He Released it into Tennessee, but then the trucks took copies away to other markets.

If he printed a different cover for Canada then we’d have a Canadian release.

If he printed a different cover for Australia, then you’d have an Australian release. Instead your releases, bought in Australia, are USA releases.

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so your bassing it on where the HQ for sparrow is if you do that that means that any one on the label Brentwood has not released an album any where but the usa that does not sound right to me. technically that part is only telling you were the copyrights are registered and who owns them. a Distributor is not a truck it is a company that supplies the released albums to shops that you buy them from in the county thay have listed so canada in this case. and you could say that it is a canadian cover for a canadian release.
i have albums by other artists that are on different labels that say Distributed in canada or canada and the usa Keith green is one michael card is another and i have a few more thay are all US artists

i wish thay would put the release country on the album some were it would make it so much less of a pain. iv tried contacting steve green but he did not reply

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2 posts were split to a new topic: “CA” as abbreviation for Canada

Not quite. I am basing it on where Steve Green is at the time he makes the decision to put out a record. Steve chooses where and when the Release happens, not Sparrow. See also @Freso’s note above:

You should focus on what Steve Green is doing when he puts out a record.

Steve walked into a studio and recorded some music. He then took that recording to a publisher - in this case Sparrow.

He then ask Sparrow to make him some disks for sale. He agreed cover artwork with them that has the addresses of two distributors on the read. Sparrow makes the disks and hands the boxes of disks to Steve. As part of that deal Sparrow gets copyright to some markets.

Steve then ask his own Marketing Team to promote the new album. Steve chose what date to put the record out. And he chose where and how to then distribute that record.

So it is Steve and his team who do the Release. He has Sparrow doing the production. He then has various companies contracted to deliver the CDs in various countries. Often those companies will also do marketing of the product as they more they sell the more they make.

I haven’t looked at the Brentwood label yet. Do they have offices in other countries? I know Sparrow only has that USA office, so they are going to be mainly USA releases. When you look at someone like EMI they have offices in USA, Europe, Japan and produce very different editions for each of those areas. Often releasing them on different dates too.

Yeah, this is part of our problems. The text on the disk is hopeless for really nailing things down. Only Steve Green and his Team know the truth. This is why we need to rely on finding other sources to confirm release dates. Ideally independent press articles, fan sites, discographies.

I am not a Lawyer, so all the copyright \ phonographic rights is a land of confusion to me. I do know that greedy capitalists need to take a cut of other people’s work. So they slice up markets and say “when we make a disc for Steve to sell then we keep a cut of the profits in this market”.

This is why we have the USA and Canadian addresses on the back. Different companies got the deals on distribution in different geographic areas.

Ideally you need to go dig into Steve’s websites and old news items on him. See if he did tours in Canada. I expect you are probably safe to tick USA and CANADA for many of those releases. The real gem we want to locate is MULTIPLE rear covers. That would them made it all clearer. :slight_smile:

Yes, I am aware that a distributor is more than a truck, but I am trying to simplify this all so it makes more sense. :wink: This confuses me enough anyway, so it is handy to write it out straight.

We’ll get to them in time after we sort out Steve Green. Though it sounds like they are following a similar pattern.

I should also point out that I don’t pretend to be an expert on this. I too am still trying to make sense of all these people who think they “own” a product. :slight_smile: Whilst also trying to understand the guidelines here at MB which are subtly different to Discogs and other similar sites.

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I got the impression that Freso’s comment was specifically addressing self-released product as he was responding to your comment about discs

For releases through a conventional label I don’t think it is generally true that

Obviously it depends on the specifics of the contract, but it’s pretty common for an artist to sign with a single label, and the label to determine how (or if) that release gets to various markets. The label may release it themselves, or license it to other labels in specific countries, or they may not release it in a given country at all (in which case it makes its way there through “import” distribution).

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The “released from website” was about a different Steve. That was Steve Grace which I had confused for a while.

Am I generally on the right track? Are these releases of Steve Green mainly USA? Or would you add CANADA every time you see that Canadian distribution mentioned on the cover?

Steve Green has Sparrow as his label, and that is a USA label, who is USA based, and clearly selling to USA.

I do want to get this correct. :slight_smile:

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As I said upthread, I would list all the ones I’ve seen as US releases. However, if another editor had listed them as joint US and Canadian releases, based on a “Distributed in Canada by XYZ” message on the back cover, I wouldn’t change it.

This gets into territory covered in a thread regarding digital releases - many of which are listed in MB with all the countries in which they are purchasable listed as “release countries”. I personally think this leads to absurdity, but in the absence of a clearer guideline on what constitutes a release country, I’m not going to mess with it.

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Yep, the country field is not clearly defined so different editors use the field in different ways, including for physical vs. digital releases. I use it to indicate the primary market of the release, which is also how the field is used on Discogs. For the examples given, I would enter USA as the country, based on the information given on the back of the CD covers.

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@Kid_Devine could you tell me what info your are basing usa on so i can understand a bit better. it is not that i dont believe it is a US release im just trying to understand others reasons behind saying it is a US release.

(btw all here in Australia if your talking about the USA we shorten it to US we like to shorten things here especially names)

i forgot what label we where talking about thats why i said Brentwood

so you all think we should leave the distributed countries out of it and base it on the country the label was in at the time the album was soled and the country the artist was living in at the time
i have another question i have witch could happen. lest say an artist was was living in a country that is not the US and then released an album with sparrow what country would you put then?

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I don’t believe the artist’s country enters into it, except in the case of a self-released album. If the only place you can get it is from the artist (in person or via their website), then the release country is wherever the artist is based.

An Australian (or other non-US) artist putting out a release on a US label is a US release.
A US based artist putting out a release on a UK label is a UK release.

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ok thanks @highstrung that helps clear things up a lot and makes it simple
tho what if it is an album aimed at a set country like this one

I don’t see the confusion. It’s marketed specifically to Australia, by an Australian label, Seems clearly an Australian release to me. Is there something about it that makes you think otherwise?

maranatha! music is a us label https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maranatha!_Music

Ah, I see. This is licensed from Maranatha and released by KI Entertainment in Australia. I would list both those as release labels, since both logos appear on the cover.

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One thing to note is parallel imports are legal in Australia.
It is perfectly legal to as a company go to another country and buy stock there and import this for sale in Australia.
As long as the rights to press the cd was valid in the source country it is ok.

For the big music stores this does not cause a problem as they will buy from the manufacturers of the cd that have the australian rights and if they parallel import from another source they may cut them off.
But for smaller stores such as Koorong they may just go to another country instead of getting the australian rights to create the cd.

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@dns_server In MusicBrainz terms, for a release as you describe, would you set the country to USA?

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Personally I probably would set the release to the USA.

I do occasionally get some parallel imported cd’s (where it can be clearly marked as such).
I do buy the ministry of sound compilation from the uk in one of the big chain stores and it does have a label indicating it is a parallel import.

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