How to handle "compilations of albums"

Hello,

Apologies is this had been asked before, but I couldn’t find an answer via a search or by reading the following documentation:

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Release_Group/Type
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Release_Group

The question: how to handle re-releases of previously published albums if they have been bundled up into a single release?

This kind of releases are actully quite common - for example, multi-disc anthologies are common, where each disc is actually a previously released album. As an example and to clear what I mean, I’ve made a new release group for case which falls into the category of the title: Release “3 Essential Albums” by George Benson - MusicBrainz

But the “problem” is as follows: All those three discs already exist as stand-alone release groups, it would kind of make sense to use those (as clearly outlined by the documentation I’ve linked); however then one would “lose” all information from this bundle! Alternative way to handle these would be to add all discs separately in their respective album release groups, and use the annotation field to have all the information about the compilation, but that would seem very clunky and awkward to me. So I deduced I must make a new release group, although it doesn’t seem optimal.

What do you think, is this the right way to handle this case - despite kind of being in conflict with the documentation?

I suppose there is no way to make a database which would optimally cover all styles of publishing music labels can come up with…

Cheers!

You should simply create a new release group and then link it to the previous release groups via the “includes” relationship.

This applies to most forms of “2 in 1”, “3 in 1”, box set, etc. reissue releases.

Example:

4 Likes

Thanks draconx!

That relationships dialog is a bit counter-intuitive; It never occurred the second field in the dialog could affect the available types (which is the first field).

Yes that was very confusing to me at first too. Nowadays I almost always just paste a URL into the box, which auto-selects the entity type, then choose the appropriate relationship type.

1 Like