I was looking through the Dream Dance series (Dream Dance - MusicBrainz) and while all the release group names are consistent “Dream Dance, Vol. X” the individual releases are a mixed bag of “Dream Dance X” and “Dream Dance, Vol. X”.
Reading History:Series Number Style - MusicBrainz Wiki , it seems to strongly suggest that the formatting should be “Dream Dance, Volume X” unless there is a strong reason not to follow this (like provable artist intent).
The album art does show a mix of “Dream Dance X” and “Dream Dance vol. X” which is why I think they remain inconsistent in the first place.
Should all of these releases and release groups be renamed to “Dream Dance, Volume X”?
I think the current style guide for that is Style / Titles - MusicBrainz. That doesn’t recommend any standard form, and the examples are a variety of forms.
Notice the History in the title of this page.
We stick to what is printed, as we now have Series.
Hacking titles was a way to simulate Series by search queries on identical titles, maybe.
The first release had no number, the second was roman numerals, third had no exclamation mark… then it settled down for a while with the odd bit of Roman Numerals popping up now and then.
That “!” wasn’t on the first covers. First appeared after the “Now!” on volume 18, then at the end of the title on 20. Where it seem to finally settle down.
When I initially added this forum post I noticed there was a heap of errors on that series. Someone had clearly gone through and edited many of the Release Groups titles to “look neat”. That is now fixed. I’ll no doubt annoy someone, but what was odd is most of the releases are correctly titled. It was only the RGs that had been changed from 5 to 19.
Another possibility is that it helped avoid contention before NGS, when multiple releases had to share a title. If one release was “Foo, Part 1” and another “Foo: Pt. 1”, the style guide resolved the conflict. But now of course those would just be separate releases each with their own title.