I was filling in extra information for some releases for Power Glove and I noticed two of their releases, Playback and Throwback, have a label, “So Bad” listed on multiple streaming services metadata. Throwback only has So Bad listed in the metadata, but not on visible copyright information on the page, while playback was visibly listed as copyrighted by “So Bad”
I couldn’t find and information about this label in their bandcamp and googling “So Bad record label” didn’t bring up anything useful, but when I searched for “power glove so bad” I found this.
From the section of the style guide on auto releases:
In some (somewhat rare) cases there is an imprint on the release (possibly the artist wants to give his “label” an identity). You may use that instead of [no label].
For digital releases a label field is sometimes required by stores, and as such self-releases sometimes get assigned the artist name, or a code assigned by the distributor (such as “123456 Records DK”), as the designed “label”. These are still self-releases and should generally be added as [no label].
The first case mentioned doesn’t seem that rare. I’ve seen a number of digital only imprints on bandcamp that are mostly just one artist and maybe a few associated acts.
This seems to be halfway between the two cases mentioned in the style guide. It was only entered in the mandatory field on streaming services and doesn’t seem to be anywhere else, which makes me think it was only entered because it was a mandatory field and they put in “So Bad” as a joke. But also, it’s more than was necessary as a place holder, like in the second case from the style guide, and it is distinct branding associated with the band. So, should “So Bad” be entered as an imprint, or maybe just noted as an annotation on the releases?