When editing albums with a large number of release events, the page takes a long time to load, especially for albums released in many countries. You can test this issue with the following release:
Log in - MusicBrainz.
Is this a known issue?
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Yes it’s been known for a long time, digital releases with many release events slow down the site. You can check Digital releases: Merging? / Long country list? / Just [Worldwide]? for a long discussion around the topic.
The consensus in these cases (as far as I’ve seen) is to set these releases to either worldwide or leave the release country blank, to avoid spamming release events.
That release you linked seems to only be unavailable in Puerto Rico and the British Indian Ocean Territory (see Harmony cached page) it’s available everywhere else. It’s up to you if you want to set it to worldwide or leave it blank, but either is preferable to 100+ release events.
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I am of the understanding that if you encounter such a mess you should in theory clean it up; there is no easy way to do this but I found running this command in my Development Console in Firefox it will clear them (after crashing the page for ~2 minutes)
$('.icon.remove-item.remove-release-event').click()
I also believe we are meant to then set the country to blank and only set XW when a service (like Harmony) identifies it as such.
Ultimately its a boring and irritating task but it has to be done; you can easily find these kinds of releases by going to countries that wouldn’t normally “release” music, e.g. Andorra - MusicBrainz
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How does one run that command you have added?
I have sometimes tried to fix these but pressing the delete button 150+ times is mind numbing.
Could you screen snip a “where to paste the command” for those of us who are not web devs?
I did also think there was a current request from above that asked not to delete this as it also caused problems? I lose track as to the state of this. 
I’ve never really been a fan of documenting where a shop sells things. Probably my thoughts in that long thread somewhere…
(at least in firefox)
- Press F12
- Click Console
- Paste Command (or press arrow up to retrieve last command)
- Enter to run the command
- Magic happens
- Save changes
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I kind of agree… at least since the dawn of the internet its not exactly been “difficult” to import stuff… OK so it was sold in the USA so what it’s now being resold in the UK or France or Germany etc.
I think what IS more interesting is to capture things like where the item was manufactured, printed, distributed etc. At least those are easy to prove (as its often printed on the release or medium at some point).
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I have a bookmarklet I use for this purpose, I forget where it came from (kellnerd, maybe). I have it saved as a bookmark in Chrome and I just click it on the edit release page.
javascript:$(“.remove-release-event:not(:first)”).trigger(“click”),void $(“#country-0”).val(240).trigger(“change”);
EDIT: Found it GitHub - kellnerd/musicbrainz-scripts: Bookmarklets and Userscripts for MusicBrainz.org
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Be careful not to go crazy with the script, particularly with releases where the recordings have many relationships. I seem to have caused an issue some months back due to mass removing release events on 18 releases. https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/SEARCH-722
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yeah i try and space them out myself, gives the indexers a chance to “recover” as it were
My thoughts on this are in the other threads. < rant mode > Physical releases are easy as we can say where they were manufactured and then released. Digital releases are literally anywhere the shop can access on that day… what annoys me the most is when you see a 2005 release documented as available in countries that didn’t even have a Spotify service in that year… It is a shop. It sells to where the shop sells. This is not “release” data. It is distribution.
ARGH. </rant mode>
@agatzk will also look at your bookmarklet. Thanks.
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I’m always of the opinion that most digital releases are just the same thing - same content, same track listing, likely come from the same original source. If you listen to them in 2025 on Apple Music, it’s likely “sonically” the same music if you listened to it in 2015 on Deezer, 2010 on Spotify, the copy you bought from iTunes in 2008 etc.
its why if ever I import a digital release (which I do) and its date is pre-2000(ish) then I will often scrap the date entirely… to be honest I should probably set the cut-off at 2003 as that is when iTunes was released and you would hope that most big label releases from then on would have been distributed both physically and digitally at the same time.
However I have a strange feeling there might have been other legit digital music stores pre-2003 but information on them seems a bit wishy-washy at best.
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Often, yes. But where there is a separate distributor/barcode for a Japan vs. the United States (for instance) it is still useful information (this is not an argument for long country lists, just saying that there are legitimate cases where the annotation should be used to highlight that there is an explicit regional distribution of the release)
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Yeah, I see that with Pink Floyd and @tigerman325 tries to document the separate territories. But in the majority of cases it is just pointless noise that loses any real information. “everywhere except a few islands” or “everywhere except a couple of countries that politics says no” is pointless info. But that is arguments for a different thread.
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