There are two Finding God Before God Finds Me releases by Bad Omens (1, 2), and they seem to be duplicates.
The first one has the most information, many links, barcode, etc. The second one only has 1 Apple Music link, which is dead.
I assume the best practice here would be to merge the second one into the first one, and mark the dead link as ‘ended’?
I’d say no. For some reason Sumerian re-released it in 2022 with 2 additional zeroes at the beginning of the barcode. The barcode for the release with the dead Apple link was definitely 810016760788, as this was found by the Apple Collection match file which is always correct, while the new one definitely 00810016760788 as found with the ToadKing script, which is also always correct. I know not everyone agrees with keeping the padded zeroes, but this is another instance where it changed and it was enough for all the sites to issue new URLs because of it.
One is marked as “Withdrawn.” That’s probably why.
I’d have to agree with Tigerman, that the releases should remain separate. I’d probably merge the Release Groups, though.
Okay, I see you’ve correctly set the information now. How were you able to get the barcode for the old apple music url?
I think, it’s settled for now, but I would have supported merging the releases.
The barcode is a product number and it does not change its value when leading zeros are added. Printing an additional zero on a physical item would indeed lead to a new release, but that would be due to an artwork change.
If leading zeros displayed are the only difference, I would consider it an unchanged release.
Or first to second. It’s not clear. I never wanted to try and experiment with this.