I came across an annoying issue and wanted to know how best to handle it.
The band is question:
This applies to almost all of their releases from before 2018.
As far as can tell all the URLs for their releases on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. have not changed since they were originally released but at some point, they were shadow-edited and the label was updated from “Rookies & Kings” to “Anti Alles”(the band’s own label I think as it only applies to them) rather than a whole new album ID/page/URL being created.
The release is technically the same but with modified info so now if I wanted to add these as a new release on MusicBrainz, should I use the original date of the URL/digital store release or just leave no date at all?
Unfortunately, barely any of their music shows up on IFPI and the ones that do are not the ones with shadow edits.
I suppose the last rule in Style / Release - MusicBrainz seems to be the closest to the situation but I am not entirely sure if this situation is what it is referring to or only the instances where something like the album suddenly has a new URL and UPC, but nothing else has changed or maybe some spelling corrections.
Usually, they don’t make changes without changing the URL and sometimes the UPC. In fact, I think this is the first time I have seen this. It would be great to get some clarification on the last sentence as to what a “straight replacement” is and how it differs from a “reissue” in digital media.
Replaced releases
Sometimes an artist will take down or recall an existing official release and then immediately reissue it with some changes; this is especially common for digital media releases. In these cases, mark the taken down release with the Withdrawn status and add a new release to the release group with the appropriate changes (and a release date matching whenever the change happened, if known). You can link these releases with the “replaced by” relationship. For example, if a trans artist re-releases their releases after a name change, the old releases should be marked as Withdrawn (not edited nor removed) and new releases should be added to replace them.
Keep in mind this applies only for straight replacements; a release being reissued of course doesn’t mean the previous versions should be marked as Withdrawn.
To be honest, release labels for digital media releases feel nebulous enough to me that I probably wouldn’t bother adding a new release here. Maybe others have opinions on whether it would be reasonable to add Anti Alles as a second label on the releases that have been updated.
If you want to reenter these with updated release dates (which would probably be the correct thing to do if new releases are being added), https://music.apple.com/us/album/wir-sind-gott-tour-edition/1127698314 looks like it was credited to Rookies & Kings on 2021-05-16 but to Anti Alles on 2021-10-22, so a 2021 release year seems correct in that case. That seems to line up with most of the
Hämatom releases at https://www.discogs.com/label/242916-Anti-Alles (but based on the logos shown in the images there, I think that that Discogs page is mixing together the Hämatom label and an earlier German hip hop label).
Ya, adding a new release with a date of 2021 was what I was planning based on that same archive info. While a label change is generally nothing really special normally, it’s not often that a band switches to their own label and seemingly gets the rights to most of their old music.
Usually when this happens, the new label shown on the release didn’t exist when the release first came out. That makes it objectively wrong to use the combination of the original date with the new label.
The principle of capturing snapshots of changing digital releases would seem to apply here. (The only issue is if you don’t know the date, then you have to leave it blank.)
