Yeah, that’s a pretty good description of what a series typically is, but I don’t think it should be taken as a strict set of conditions.
Example (of a series that doesn’t strictly fit that definition):
https://www.discogs.com/label/541008-The-Nice-Price
The “common theme” was that material was being reissued at a lower price 
[quote=“spitzwegerich, post:15, topic:181449”]
They cannot be the same label since the logos are completely different and one has “Deutsche Grammophon” in the name, but the other one has not.[/quote]
We can’t be too stringent with stuff like this, if I have my own label I can change the logo, layout, and text with every release if I want, and it would still be the same label if that’s how I’m releasing it.
Large commercial labels tend to be fickle with their branding - basically, I don’t think Deutsche Grammophon adjusting their brand to remove the ‘Deutsche Grammophon’ part constitutes them starting a new label.
But I guess ‘Resonance’ morphed into its own stronger entity with time.
My preference would be to assign it all to the label:
Deutsche Grammophon Resonance (rebranded to just ‘Resonance’ after 1994)
(brackets is the disambig, and assuming 1994 is the concrete date for the change)
If you feel like it’s necessary you could also assign ‘Deutsche Grammophon’ to all earlier releases, and add a series as well, as it’s all technically correct, but I don’t think that necessary makes life easier for anybody.
But the “Label” field on a Release is not the label, it’s the label’s imprint. (This has been discussed several times.) So maybe it could be said that “Deutsche Grammophon adjusting their brand to remove the ‘Deutsche Grammophon’ part constitutes them starting a new [imprint]”? (I don’t know and I’m not really sold in either direction. Just keep in mind that you can still do Label-Release relationships to add more specific/meaningful Label-Release relationships.)
That was exactly my reasoning. To my understanding of labels in musicbrainz, we cannot say that the 1994 Version belongs to the label “Deutsche Grammophon”, as the writing on the logo reads “Resonance” and nothing else. This would contradict our guidelines.
I would say yes, definitely. While the 1994 Resonance logo is somewhat related (ornament, color), it’s not exactly similar to the logo of Deutsche Grammophon.
A few days ago, I had adjusted the annotations to the following standard:
Releases in the old Resonance-style (logo of Deutsche Grammophon with the writing Resonance below) go to the label Deutsche Grammophon and the Series Resonance.
Releases in the new Resonance-style (logo without the writing “Resonance”, but without the writing “Deutsche Grammophon”) go to the label Resonance.
As there was no real agreement, I would like to ask again if this is ok or if I should change something. I’m not really determined on the above regulation, in fact I could very well live without the series “Resonance” and just putting everything into a label “Resonance” (as it was before the introduction of the series).
However, I think there should be clear guidelines given in the annotations to enforce a consistent treatment. And (as labels are imprints) I’m decided that the Resonance-releases of the new 1994-style must be their own label, they cannot go into the label “Deutsche Grammophon” as the logo is too different (the writing on the label tells us “Resonance” and not “Deutsche Grammophon”).
I really hope that we can come to a decision.
I would find it annoying to have to switch between a series and a couple of labels to find everything, just because they changed the logo… (if I’ve been following this correctly)
But I think I’m in the minority, as always any decision is better than no decision!
I agree with @aerozol that all the “Resonance” branded releases should be kept together in the one label. I suggest merging the labels Deutsche Grammophon Resonance and Resonance.
ok, let’s summarize the different arguments:
Reflecting on this, I would like to suggest the following solution (which differs a bit from the one I set up 2 weeks ago):
This is in agreement with arguments 1. (all Resonance releases are in the associated series), 2. and 3.
As CallerNo6, I think argument 4. is met, too. The common theme is “Re-released recordings of Deutsche Grammophon, associated with the word “Resonance”.”
Remarks:
Comments welcome!
Are there any objections to this solution? If not, I will consider this a decision and do the changes in a few days.
Thanks for writing this summary! I think the changes you’re proposing would be an improvement on the current situation, as the labels would more closely match the imprints on the releases. I’ll make one point though:
For the earlier “Resonance” releases like this one, I don’t think I would enter the Label as “Deutsch Grammophon Resonance”. If I had that CD in my hands, I would enter “Deutsche Grammophon” as a label since it appears (by itself) on the CD label. I would also enter “Resonance” as an additional label since that’s what it says on the spine of the case.
Now, there seems to be disagreement about entering more than one label on some releases, but that’s what I’d do in this case.
My point is that if there is a Label “Deutsche Grammophon” and a Label “Resonance”, I don’t think it’s necessary that there’s also “Deutsche Grammophon Resonance”.
Thanks for this input! The logo on the cover art you linked is the “old style” one. I agree with you that there are different ways to “read” the old style logo (consisting of the logo of Deutsche Grammophon together with the text “Resonance” in a common square box):
For me, all three interpretations would be fine.
The most important thing is that we come to an agreement which can then be used to unify the current wealth of variants.
Personally, I’m leaning towards variant 1, for the following reason:
There are these similarly constructed logos with “Musikfest”, “Privilege”, “Favorit”, “Junior”, “Literator” (in the place of “Resonance”) around. I think a uniform treatment of all these logos is highly desirable. Currently, for each of these logos, there is an associated label: Deutsche Grammophon Musikfest, Deutsche Grammophon Privilege, Deutsche Grammophon Favorit, Deutsche Grammophon Junior, Deutsche Grammophon Literatur. So the interpretation of the full square box as a proper label on its own minimizes the changes to be done.
It would be great to hear more opinions on whether we should go with 1, 2 or 3 (or something else)!
Just found that there are also “Deutsche Grammophon Präsent” and “Deutsche Grammophon Panorama Classique” (currently not present on musicbrainz as label or series)…this is insane!
It’s not that surprising. Series have only been existing here for short time.
This would avoid having to click on multiple labels/series to try to follow the thread of one set of releases, and would also mean that all the ‘Deutsche Grammophon’ releases are listed together (which I believe shouldn’t be entirely distinct from one another), eg ‘Deutsche Grammophon Panorama Classique’ would also be split in a similar way.
Looks like a lot of work though, and needs good aliases and disambiguations so that people don’t keep re-creating the un-split label title.
I think we’re in agreement that all these Deutsche Grammophon brands should be treated as consistently as possible.
I suggest we make the edits sorting the “Resonance” releases into the “Deutsch Grammophon Resonance” and “Resonance” labels as per suggestion 1:
This shouldn’t take too long to do, and seems to me like the least controversial choice.
I’m in favour of still keeping option 2 open, and others may still have opinions to add to this thread. I’d be willing to do much of the work of reorganising all these labels, but it would be good to have more people give their opinions before undertaking such a large batch of edits.
I have similar opinion about all of these. Earlier DG Privilege logo does even include the word “series”. Releases by these mention series name only on the cover but on medium there’s standard DG logo (1994 Resonance is an exception). In Discogs these are all counted as series.
Feels silly to list something as a label in MB when in real life it’s considered being a series. I believe similar discussions will be endless until some day we are able to define what a label actually is in MB world.
Many thanks for your input!
If we cannot decide on “label or series”, why not “label and series”! So what about the following:
The old style Resonance releases go to
The other boxed “Deutsche Grammophon something” logos are treated similarly.
The new style Resonance releases go to
Reading your answers, I hope that this should be agreeable with everyone. The only potential counter-argument I see is that it’s a bit redundant. That’s true, but I don’t see a real problem with it. Better some redundancy than the other objections which have been mentioned.
I’ve moved some releases to the label Resonance.
EDIT: Added new label Favorit
----[quote=“spitzwegerich, post:37, topic:181449”]
The old style Resonance releases go to
the series Resonance
and
the label Deutsche Grammophon(as the logo is contained in the box, and I just noticed that some (all?) of these releases also have the pure logo on the disc)
and
the label Deutsche Grammophon Resonance.(which is justified by interpreting the box as a proper logo on its own)
[/quote]
I agree with adding “Deutsche Grammophon” as a label when the logo appears by itself somewhere on a release (it’s usually on the disc), and will start editing releases which show this. I won’t be making any edits to “Deutsche Grammophon Resonance” or any of the other similar DG labels that are currently in the database.
Great, lets bring some structure into this!
The last few days, I started going through this list of Resonance releases (and if present their Musikfest and Privilege twin siblings) and added them to the Resonance series, leaving the label untouched for the moment.
That’s interesting. So my guess is that we have to add labels “Musikfest” and “Panorama classique” as well:
From working through the list of Resonance releases (all “old style” so far), I noticed that the same release often has parallel versions branded with “Resonance”, “Privilege”, “Musikfest” or “Panorama Classique”. Their front covers have different languages: “Resonance” is German, “Privilege” and “Musikfest” are English and “Panorama Classique” is French. The rest of the release is mostly the same, all containing the same multi-language track list, and having identical cat# and barcode. My guess is that “Privilege” might be for the UK market and “Musikfest” for US. If there is more evidence, we could set the release country correspondlngly.
I’ve made an edit that would change the label “Deutsche Grammophon Musikfest” to “Musikfest”. Read my reasons and vote here.
