Release names for cover discs

LOL - that was a quote from a 2001 disc. Almost two decades back.

Some discs are clearly put together by people at the magazine choosing what they want to sell. With other magazines you can see how the label comes to the magazine and suggests the promotion. So there are subtleties in this that are not being handled by current style guidelines.

Official non-band product”?

I would say these are just as official as something like “Now this is what I call Music?”. Compilations thrown together of current hits to get people to buy more music. They are Official, but avoid appearing under an Artist as they appear under Various Artists and get lost in the noise.

Where I can see an interesting puzzle for my own music collection is sometimes Mojo Magazine produces a Cover Disc which is then full of cover versions of a single band’s music. Which will then comically confuse the language as @rkingdon noticed. A cover disc of cover versions attached to the magazine cover. Yeah… the fun of language. I want to associate that to the band but don’t want to see it as an official band release.

The BBC Music Magazine disc tend to be quality and unique collections which one would want to see among that artists work. (I have a loft to check to see if I still have these disks… Somewhere there should be at least the first five years of these…)

I’d wager that far most of the “official” releases in MusicBrainz are not available through “normal retails channels” at this point. The magazines with CDs used to be available “through normal retail channels” at one point, even if they aren’t anymore. (Also, lots of official releases were never “distributed through normal retail channels”, but only sold at concerts, the artist’s own website, etc.) I’d say that while this can be one useful factor to consider when determining release status, it is not the end-all-be-all.

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Some facts for the record:

Publications that use the word Promotion/al on medium or paper:
Classicfm, Elle, Word, The Word, Eve.

Publications that use the word Free on medium or paper:
Word of Mouth, NME, Classic Rock Magazine, Uncut (they’re sneaky - they put it on the magazine cover, not the product).

Publications that use the word Given (with) on medium or paper:
MOJO.

The best that the BBC Music magazine can do is ‘Not for resale’.

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Just to throw another hat into the ring… The Mojo website labels their discs as “Exclusive”. That’s a nice up-market term which also implies you can’t buy them through the “normal” retail channels. So we have “Promotional discs aka Cover discs, Exclusive discs and Free discs”. I don’t think the BBC’s “Not for resale” discs would add much clarity to the category. But you can’t blame the Beeb for trying…

And another variation - a record label that also produces a magazine with cover disc

At what point are these CDs released with a free attached magazine? This label has normal CD releases for their bands scattered in with the magazines.