Recently, I was fixing some of the digital media releases from Monstercat (electronic music) and I stumbled upon an issue regarding an official release by Monstercat versus releases which were released as BitTorrent bundles by the artists themselves (free legal downloads).
So far I have found two such releases, one of them being https://musicbrainz.org/release/13362506-733b-414a-b8b3-5d84c9ab713e which was added as a separate release and the other one being https://musicbrainz.org/release/e409865f-b994-4cdc-8a35-05458ae24f6e which is the official release by Monstercat but with an added download link to the BitTorrent bundle. Both of the releases have the same track listing as the official release, but the bundles seem to contain some additional content as well. The tracks are both in mp3 and wav format, the first bundle also includes four images and an album video, the second bundle also includes three images and a PDF booklet - all of which have been added to the official release as CA).
My questions are: Should they be entered as separate releases or not? If yes, then should the label still be “Monstercat” with their catalog number? And should be the additional CA from the second bundle transferred over to the new release? As for the release dates, I can see that the first bundle has been released at a later date than the official release, but the second bundle seems to have been released on the same day.
So I found out that the BitTorrent bundle for “New Age | Dark Age” has a different Track 12 (I must have missed this the first time), so it’s correct that it’s a separate release and therefore I removed the Monstercat label from it.
However the other album “Two Fold, Pt. 2” has the same tracklisting so I have no idea if it should be a separate release for the BitTorrent bundle because of the possibility to download .wav files as well as extra covers or if the dowload link for is fine to be attached on the Monstercat release.
If Monstercat is releasing the BitTorrent bundle/ linking to it from their page, I would definitely use them as the label.
If the artist is doing it themselves/they’re distributing the link, I would just put [no label].
Whether the track listing is the same or not makes no difference, if there’s some kind of other difference between releases that you want to catalogue - dates, diffferent or extra cover art, different catalogue numbers, anything at all, make a new release in the release group. As long as it’s annotated/disambiguated nicely more information doesn’t hurt, and merging later is easy if someone takes issue with it.
I usually don’t put a catalogue number on a release unless it mentions that catalogue number somewhere on the download page or the download images or similar, but I know other people just use the internal label cat. no for digital formats, so that’s a grey area - use your judgement I’d say
