New phonographic copyright and slightly different artist credits, digital media: separate release?

The digital release(s) of Release group “Pest & Power” by Patty Gurdy - MusicBrainz look a bit confusing. Release “Pest & Power” by Patty Gurdy - MusicBrainz has 3 store links, two of which no longer work. One of those two is on archive.org. The differences I see are below. Should this be 1, 2, or 3 separate releases? The feat artist differences seem somewhat significant to me since it’s not just a matter of platforms showing those differently, but differences even between two Apple pages. From New phonographic copyright holder + new iTunes store ID = new release? it seems like the different ℗s are enough to justify 3 releases though?

Old (no feat on #6, “Oliver s. Tyr & Fiona Frewert” on #10):

New (℗ 2024 Patty Gurdy, “Hellscore” on #6, “Oliver Satyr & Fiona Rüggeberg” on #10):

I think some of Patty Gurdy’s other releases have similar differences in ℗, but I don’t know of artist credit differences on them.

Separate copyrights are good enough to warrant separate releases. That’s one of the reasons the old URLs no longer work. The slightly different artist credits aren’t really enough by themself though as sometimes store fronts have a say in that (Spotify show remixers for example).

2 Likes

The streaming sites and the labels and their copyrights are quite a mess.

Quite often the rights get transferred, companies go defunct, get sold etc. Some require to cease the existing entries, some get transferred to new operators.

  1. Same streaming url is kept / same GTIN, only the rights entry / label changes. These things will usually have original release date with a label that was formed this year, which is clearly wrong (or date before the Internet). Here it would probably make sense to add the copyright change with some years in the release in MB, but then again, that data does not belong to the original. Likely just copy the release and estimate new date, deprecate links in the original.
  2. New urls, new release. The GTIN may be same still. This may still have the same erroneous original release dates and copyright year for the current rights holder/label.
  3. Cover art may change, some other data as well. Some releases may get new ISRCs to get royalties to the new entity.

Basically all should be different releases as the data we track is different. Alas, there is usually no way getting proper dates for these releases at all and fuzzy dates are not tracked in the data.

2 Likes

Thank you both! I split it up into 3 releases. I left the old ASIN on the ℗2019 release because it wasn’t on archive.org so I’m not sure which release it belongs to. And I made Edit #142860346 - MusicBrainz and Edit #142860406 - MusicBrainz voteable because I didn’t notice any evidence for the distributor relationship other than the ℗ text.