so, I’ve had a bit of a think on this, and I feel that—at least for digital media—we should go for whichever is more detailed.
for example, The Fame Monster (linked in OP) originally had “(Deluxe)” in the album field. therefore, it should go in the title, not the disambiguation.
I don’t think the title or track information should be less detailed than what is given on the release.
“Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” is not even ETI. That is subtitle and should always follow a colon per subtitle rules. Some stores put it in parenthesis, but we should change it to follow a colon unless it’s literally printed with parenthesis on the cover art. Deluxe Edition should go in parenthesis with the title unless it’s only on a sticker, but if it’s printed on the cover, it official ETI. Also, all ETI should be lowercase, not upper case.
I would like clarity on this from @reosarevok actually - it’s definitely how MB users have been interpreting the rules, but lately I’ve been thinking that the guidelines are really only there, historically anyway, to settle cases where there is ambiguity.
For instance, when you’re taking a title off a printed CD you have to make up a separator, so we have guidelines, great. However with a digital release there isn’t ambiguity. They’ve given it a title and written it a certain way.
The documentation isn’t perfectly clear. It does say if a separator is already present to keep it (the third example there). But again I think that is historical, e.g. is meant to be about printed CDs. Would be nice to get clarity.
But if the artwork doesn’t say (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), but the digital store does, shouldn’t we still treat it like the cover art? I have actually seen artwork with the parenthesis, and I leave it like that because guidelines state not the change punctuation if some exist. I suppose if you can show that it’s on EVERY digital store in parenthesis you might could say that’s officially with parenthesis, but if there’s any conflict between stores, I’d definitely go with subtitle guidelines. I’d still prefer to go with subtitle on movie soundtracks as that’s how they are normally handled.
I guess it just depends on what you choose as the title. If you mostly follow the cover (as I usually do) then you’ll want a separator, if you follow the text you can use what’s printed. I don’t think either is wrong and I don’t think anyone would mind either way too much really.
And sometimes the spines give guidance too.
indeed, I’ll usually use the spine to figure out an ambiguous ordering of the title parts, like here~