Release country for digital media: What stores are international?

What is your proposal here?

Have multiple different country types [worldwide except north korea] [worldwide expect north Korea and Iran] etc?

Maybe [worldwide] should be “mostly” worldwide.

But soon all new releases will be digital and [worldwide] anyway …

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Some people can set [worldwide] while people having confirmed a specific country will be welcome to add it to the list of release events (without removing the [worldwide]).

It reminds me of the “countryEurope (no release could possibly be Europe‐wide), which « should be considered an inferior piece of data, but acceptable until the proper release country can be determined. »
But in the end, Europe remains set together with the specific set of countries.

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I hadn’t thought about this, but it seems reasonable to handle Europe and [Worldwide] this way. Of course, for unrestricted digital media releases, their release country should actually be [Worldwide]. Why did your style ticket regarding this get rejected?

I’m not proposing anything right now, but I anticipated these questions to arise. I think it would be useful to have some facts about the major stores as a basis of discussion before making any changes. If there were just one major store that didn’t restrict their services at all, this wouldn’t be a problem.

I’m inspired by scripts such as the iTunes import script setting the country of the local store as the release country, but if [Worldwide] and Europe should be considered placeholders they should probably set both the specific country and [Worldwide].

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3 posts were split to a new topic: EU as release country/area

I usually add the rare SoundCloud releases as [worldwide] as well as releases from DatPiff, LiveMixtapes, etc.

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Yeah, I like that extra touch. Scripts sprang to mind a couple of phrases in through your question/issue such as the one for BeatportPro which automatically sets it to [Worldwide].
We shouldn’t read into this so literally, I guess many people are aware of these lists and country-limitations anyways… and as @Rovastar said pretty soon Worldwide will be reached.

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I think [Worldwide] works for most cases of digital releases. Given the complexities of region locking for each web store, [Worldwide] should suffice in all but the most narrow cases.

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After the discussion, I think I would go for this style too. Or alternatively, as @jesus2099 suggests, the placeholder approach, although I think it would generate a lot of useless data for digital media releases.

It would be nice to add a line about this somewhere in the guidelines, particularly so you have a good reason for userscript makers to change their scripts.

Along the lines of this older thread, I found this release group today:

It looks like someone put the same release date on 20+ countries (I didn’t count) for a digital release. That makes the overall page a bit harder to read. I was about to change it to [Worldwide] when I decided to check here instead. What format is preferable?

Do you think a release should be marked “Worldwide” when it doesn’t include the US, Canada, and Mexico? (I think no.)

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Regardless of them not selecting those countries, it’s digital media and I can access it via the link on the release. (I’m in the US). I’m not sure how that person came up with the list of countries, but it’s not all-inclusive.

I see you are the “them” I was talking about. Guess I should have looked at the editing history first. So, as the original poster, what was your intent of including some countries and not others? You listed Spotify as your source, but Spotify (and those recordings) are available in the US. So why not the US, Canada and Mexico?

HAIM are from the USA. It’s ridiculous to think a widespread release in all those other countries wouldn’t be available in North America.

Is the category “Country of Release” sensible/useful for digital releases?

I don’t know anywhere near enough.
But I can ask the question.
:wink:

Making the page totally unreadable is enough reason to remove all those countries, but it’s also bad data.

https://musicbrainz.org/edit/47406194

It’s not ideal that this discussion should be split between topics, but see this (seemingly unrelated) topic for more discussion on this subject. See in particular my post below for my views. I’ll try not to repeat myself, but in short, [Worldwide] isn’t necessarily incorrect data and this release is an excellent example of why adding release countries like this is a bad idea.

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This isn’t supposed to be rocket science.

https://musicbrainz.org/release/1016e6b3-1c58-488e-bc99-ed7d04d49e91 was released by Columbia (a Sony Music label) in North America. It has the UPC 886443944930.

https://musicbrainz.org/release/26c202b5-a194-4d76-be31-e43a97c6e214 was released by Polydor (a Universal Music label) elsewhere. It has the UPC 602537298372.

edit: the artist also has music released by Vertigo Berlin (another Universal Music label) in the countries not covered by Columbia and Polydor. etc.

You can’t merge these releases, and none are “worldwide”. It doesn’t matter what country the artist is from; we’re talking about release countries.

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@August_Janse: I’m curious what you think the MB Release Countries should be on these 3 MB releases:

  1. https://musicbrainz.org/release/c6d7bf18-2c53-4df1-800a-f4dc58c4844d
  2. https://musicbrainz.org/release/bdd4d8cd-0d8f-49a8-94db-cfb8082ec876
  3. https://musicbrainz.org/release/5cc7001e-df06-4582-a82e-719a84004b8c

The display of that many release dates/countries is a bit weird (but not broken per se, just takes up way too much room). That’s just a display issue though, which can (and should) be fixed. I don’t think we should decide our data model based on some minor, presumably fixable display issues.

Personally, this strikes me as one of the cases where everyone should feel free to enter as much data as they personally care to, but should respect the wishes (and work!) of anyone who wants to enter more detailed data.

So I think there should be some release location that someone who doesn’t want to research online stores across a bunch of countries can use, something to say it was released in a lot of places. [Worldwide] could be used for that—or we could pick something else, like [Widely]. (As has been pointed out, are there any true worldwide releases? Were they released in North Korea?)

And anyone who wants to put in the time to find the release dates in 30 different countries should feel free to replace that lots-of-places location with the 30 specific ones.

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How would one look at a release on the internet, posted for free by a band for example. Now, this release could be considered worldwide as there have been no restrictions placed on it by the provider of the release. For the North Korea example, this is not restriction placed by the distributor, but by the government of the buyer. So, Columbia might sell a CD in Brazil, and a different CD in USA, this is a difference introduced by distribution. So, now lets say that Brazil government bans this CD. Is the CD no longer released to Brazil?

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