hello everyone! with the removal of the “lana del rey” label, i thought we might need to discuss a new feature: “label credited as”. with the rising popularity of streaming services, in many cases, labels are credited to the artist when there’s no label. in fact, when i was releasing music independently, my distributor had a rule to use our artist name instead of “independent” or “no label”. i also think this would be useful for bootleg labels like Star Mark, which often pose as official labels.
the only problem is, what circumstances would this feature be acceptable in? obviously, we can’t merge all imprints together, so what counts as the same or a different label?
That is a pity that self published labels are getting converted to [ no label ]. Kinda funny as elsewhere in the database the use of generic labels is being frowned upon and removed.
I just added a note to that edit. Maybe a [ self release ] label could be created? It would make the action clearer. The artist released the track themselves, but didn’t bother creating a label to do so. Must be a common thing now in a digital media world.
I thought no label was literally that. There is no label on the cover. Which also happens to bootlegs and many other types of releases.
But we know if an artist puts their own music out on their own site then they are the ones releasing it. I am also thinking about extra free tracks an artist may put out for many and varied reasons from their own servers (or a Bandcamp \ My Space server they are populating)
I was curious if there was a better way we could flag this.
Totally agree. Shops and their random data can go jump. Their quality of data is welll known to be in the “don’t care” category and I didn’t want this to go off track into another shop debate
AFAIK when it comes to self published music from doujin circles sometimes the circle acts as the RG artist AND label and MB accepts it this way
I don’t understand why would it be different for these cases.
Doujin circles are treated weirdly here to begin with. For example, I have no idea why La La Fav! is entered as a Confetto release rather than a Nanahira release. All of the tracks are by Nanahira (only the last track features 2 other artists) and her name even appears on the cover art. I pretty much avoid editing doujin stuff on here though because I’ve gotten heavily shot down in the past for reasons I don’t understand so it’s annoying lol.
Doujin circles do make sense as labels to me though. The circle, which is basically a collective, is treated like an imprint. The name appears on the CDs most (all?) of the time, which validates it, IMO. As an RG artist…if the release contains tracks from various members of the circle, then that makes sense. Otherwise, I think the RG artist should be who’s primarily on the release(s).
Yeah doujin circles are weird and sometimes there’s no room for any discussion because they get shot down real quick.
My point was that an established artist releasing music on their own works the same as a one-man circle releasing anything, with artist and label being the same name/entity.
I do agree with @IvanDobsky on the need for a [self-released] entity
[no label] is meant to be effectively the same as “self released”, so we won’t be adding a separate entry for that. It’s not meant to be “the label is not printed, but there is one”, it’s meant as “there is no label releasing that, and that is known”. Yes, that does also apply to a few other cases, such as many (but not all) bootlegs, but that shouldn’t be a problem: if a release is “official, [no label]” there’s very little else it could be but a self-released release. I don’t see anything “[self released]” would add over “[no label]” set to “official”, really.
The alternative is to do what Discogs does, and actually have a different label for each artist’s self-released music: https://www.discogs.com/search/?q=Not+On+Label&type=label - personally, I find that to be a horrible mess (and I can’t even imagine how much worse it gets if several artists are collaborating on a self-released release - does it get assigned to all of the artists’ self releases labels? Do we try to find out which of the artists actually took care of the releasing?)
Which essentially does the same thing as what discogs does (giving each artist their own label).
If this is something that comes up a lot or would be really useful then we could put a [+] next to any [no label] label on a release that gives us a pop up that pre-populates that search with the artists name.
I was adding a release several months ago (don’t remember which one), and when I was entering one item (catalog number, I think, but I don’t know for sure), a pop-up appeared. It said something about that specific catalog number (or whatever it was) being bogus, and maybe I shouldn’t use it (I wish I could remember it more clearly).
I wonder if something similar can be done here. Something like, if the string they entered for Label is identical to the Artist name, pop up a message saying “If this is a self-published release, use [no label]. Don’t use the artist’s name.” Or something like that.
I actually like the idea of [self-released] as a label. together with that fancy search feature in MBS-12070 above, that might separate out the artist’s releases and bootleg releases more easily.
granted, I guess you could also add something to the search that excludes bootlegs for similar functionality…
