Same album sung in different languages on MusicBrainz

MusicBrainz Style
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I am not a heavy user of MB but to me, it makes sense to group releases in this scenario into one release album.

I run into this issue a lot with Indian films, a lot of which get dubbed and released in multiple languages. When I look them up or use Picard to tag these albums, I want them to be linked together as they are the same film. The language doesn’t change the story or the plot of the movie. In addition, the tracklist and the artists tend to be the same on the different releases. Given that, I think it makes sense to have one release group per film with each language as a release within that release group.

Here are a couple examples of Indian films with soundtracks in multiple languages for context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_(soundtrack).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baahubali:The_Beginning(soundtrack)

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Just a quick statement of my thoughts…

I understand a release group to be the same album and containing all of its versions. Without looking at or reading guidelines, that is based on the fact that a standard and deluxe go in the same group, a promo and a official in the same, windowed albums, etc. For sure I see it as a separate release vs a release event, but the album itself is the same.

Personally, I would think that a deluxe and a standard would have separate groups before the same release in a different language… but that is not the topic. Just sharing my 2 cents and logic.

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The different language RGs could be grouped into a Series.
[leaves to visit Joeseph Mifsud for a month]

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Languages in user profile

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So here we go again, from my side I mostly agree with @chabreyflint point of view.

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Following the theatrical release of Frozen 2 there are at least 4 release groups in different languages at MB. Some recordings are the same, others not.

I bet there is also an Italian or an Spanish version out there…
Is there a relationship type to link these release groups? Series doesn’t seem to fit, as this isn’t really a sequence.

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I am in favour of separate RGs simply to avoid having discussions about the RG title, plus to make things easier to find from artist pages.

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I completely agree. And this doesn’t just affect movie soundtracks - all the big latin crooners in the 70s and 80s released their albums in a bunch of languages, often with the same title (ex. Julio Iglesias, Roberto Carlos, etc.).

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For the moment, nothing tells us to not merge those in official release group guideline (I personally am more in favour of grouping all language versions).

Actually it’s like what we do or not do with remixes.
There is a Remix subtype but, in practice, some use it while some put them all in the same Single release group.

A link should be put in the What should not be grouped together section to Style /Specific types of releases / Soundtrack / Release Group to raise attention on this point.
But for now, if you know this latter page, only soundtracks are affected by this not-merge policy.
Until some new guideline is decided.

Update

My post gives the wrong impression that I will merge groups but in fact, as we are still in doubt, I will not change how any existing release groups are separated.
I just mean that we don’t apparently have any visible guideline on this matter, except the slightly hidden one that only relates to Soundtracks.