I just bought a lovely CD, Affairs of the Heart by Marjan Mozetich, Amazon ASIN B015JSMZHI . It is a 2015 reissue of a 2000 original. The 2000 original has Amazon ASIN B00005Y7MN and is in MB as MBID release/5335ef7b-8193-448b-8b7e-62d692923238.
Is the 2015 reissue CD a new Release within the same Release Group as the 2000 original? Or is the 2015 reissue a new Release Event within the same Release?
Part of what makes this difficult is that I don’t see any description of what a Release Event is in Style/Release or Style/Release Group. If I ask the MusicBrainz “edit Release” UI to add a Release Event, it only lets me supply a release date and release country. Does this mean that for two physical CDs to be from different Release Events of the same Release, they must have the same cover art, label, catalogue number, bar code, etc.?
Part of what makes this difficult is that the two CDs are similar in interesting ways. They have the same DiscID, so Picard reads the new CD and instantly finds the old Release. Yet they are different in many other ways. For example:
- Cover art: different
- Label: different
- Catalogue number: different
- Release date: different
- Amazon ASIN: different
- Track list: identical
- DiscID: Identical
So, which is the 2015 CD? A new Release, or a Release Event of the same Release? Why?
Plus, I see that it’s possible for one Release to have multiple entries of Label and Catalogue number. What is this for?
I don’t see that Style/Release really explains.
However, the Catalog Number documentation has some useful guidance. “…Many releases feature two or more catalog numbers. This is especially true for international releases on imprints controlled by major companies. In cases like this, there are several options.”
Is this official style guidance? If so, it would be good to link from Style/Release to this page, or move the content up.
In that case it is really clear, it is a separate release. As you noted yourself nearly all the identifying data is different , that makes it a different release.
Multiple release events are for the exact same release being released e.g. in different countries and maybe in (slightly) different times. But as soon as one of those country releases is different in some regard (different label, barcode, cover art, …) it should be a separate release, too.
Multiple labels and catalogue numbers are, as you found out, for cases where there are multiple of those on the release itself. But even in this case there are many cases where beside the releasing label all the parent labels are listed, and I think in this case we use only the most specific. But labels can be messy 
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Multiple catalog numbers example, put out by a collaboration of underground DIY labels from all around Europe. Theoretically this could be listed under each of their countries too, but I guess it was decided “Europe” was appropriate enough.
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These are helpful clarifications, thanks.
I’d like to see this discussion result in improvements to the documentation. One of these days I’ll make some edits to the wiki behind the docs.