Style guideline for Robert Fripp live releases

ballsdick · July 9, 2026, 7:36am

Hello,

I’ve been having trouble figuring out how to style the live albums that Fripp releases online at DGMlive.com.

Brief: releases part of a series (“Soundscapes”) with poorly documented, unverifiable and lost (crimson alive database is gone) release date information, and confusing and contrasting titling needs rework on MB. Should I “Be Bold” and standardize the releases how I think is best?

Details:

I have just created two releases in the style that I think aligns best with MB guidelines: Wulfren Civic Hall, and MDH. As I stated in my edit notes for these releases, the naming scheme I landed on differs from what other editors have chosen, and I must say that there is no concord between prior releaseas either.

The issue stems from the fact that the releases themselves are a bit confusingly named, and don’t really align with convention. In fact, on the CD “releases” of these works, the title is different than it is on the website. I will soon upload some images to demonstrate what the CD cover displays, but please have a look at the discography entry of MDH on DGMlive.com, and tell me what you think the title should be.

Another thing of note is that there is no good catalog of when each work was released. From what I can tell, some releases have taken to using the date of performance in lieu of the release date. This is not in line with MB guidelines, but I can appreciate the confusion in this regard.

I wonder if MB has a similar “Be Bold” policy as Wikipedia in editing releases? Should I go ahead and remove those dates if it seems like they are just using performance date as release date erroneously?

Finally, for what it’s worth, an editor over on RYM has standardized the information of Fripp’s live discography to align generally with what appears on the CD cover.

An edit note explaining their rationale

Note that they have included the title of the series that these live recordings make up: “Soundscapes”. Is there guidance somewhere on MB about thematically related works and how to name them?

jesus2099 · July 9, 2026, 9:15am

I don’t know if I understood everything, but:

Titles

If you want to link “Soundscapes” releases together, you can make a release (group?) series and link them, but we don’t add a “Soundscapes” prefix to all releases, when it does not appear as part of the title, on their packaging.

About the title, you were right to follow physical packaging, rather than online shops and rather than a standardisation.

Release dates

Indeed, release date is not the concert date.

ballsdick · July 10, 2026, 12:47am

Thanks for your reply, jesus2099, and the confirmation about release dates. I will try and find the ones which seem wrong and remove them then.

Regarding the titles, please let me try to clarify. Because as I am thinking more about it, there are a few aspects to this.

Release group series
- this was exactly what I was looking for. This will remove the need to have the series name in the release title
What to Include in title
Title ordering

For these, I am disregarding the precedent set by previous releases on MB and looking solely at the official sources.

The issue is that the official sources do not agree with each other. A case in point: my previously-linked discography entry/purchase page for MDH. From what I can tell, this is the only place where the work can be purchased. Here, visually speaking, the title of the release seems to simply be MDH. Indeed, the semantics in the page HTML also support this view:

Indeed, “Soundscapes” is not mentioned in the titling. It seems like the city and date of performance are listed as extra information, beneath the artist’s name. I went based off this in titling the release as just “MDH”.

However, things get complicated because of those “CD releases” I mentioned earlier. The album can only be purchased as a download, and I suspect that with the download comes some sort of digital, printable case art for the album. It seems to be an official design, because it has mentions for copyright, along with a statement saying “Downloaded from dgmlive.com”. Plus, the design is consistent across the various Soundscapes releases, as can be seen in the RYM screenshot, where the albums all use this style of CD cover, instead of the art that is listed on the relevant page on dgmlive.

On this cover, there is no indication of what is actually part of the title, and what is extra information. If we were to go off of this, then we could go a few ways:

“Soundscapes: MDH, Manchester, UK, December 8, 2005” – we’ve already ruled this one out.

“MDH, Manchester, UK, December 8, 2005”

“MDH, Manchester, UK” – I lean toward this, personally, if we are to accept the validity of the CD cover art.

To make matters worse, on the spine, where space is at a premium, the title is merely “Manchester”.

I guess the biggest question really is should we follow the “packaging” of the virtual CD release, which is just a download + a PDF of a CD cover; or should we go with what is listed on the label/store website? Important to note that DGM is Fripp’s personal label and so maybe we can assume that if something is listed there, it is as he intends it to be.

I hope this helps to clear things up a little bit, I admit it is quite difficult for me to explain concisely.

aerozol · July 10, 2026, 1:03am

I’m not sure it’s ruled out - the scans you have shared do indeed include ‘Soundscapes’ quite prominently?

You can follow ‘as titled’ for the DGMlive releases, but the release group should follow the title of the earliest canonical release (e.g. the CD or any earlier digital releases/covers).

jesus2099 · July 10, 2026, 5:43am

According to your cover art, I would even keep the artist name:

Robert Fripp Soundscapes: MDH, Manchester, UK: December 8, 2005

Does Soundscapes exist for other artists?

ballsdick · July 10, 2026, 6:29am

Yes, quite true. I guess we can’t exactly rule it out. Although, I think there is an argument to be made on excluding it, since all the Soundscapes releases include it on the “paper” copy.

I have a bit more information about the paper copy, actually. An edit note from 2012 on this Discogs release page for a different Soundscapes album confirms my suspicion about how the paper cover works:

Live album downloadable (with two-fold front and back sleeve) available for purchase only from dgmlive.com.
…
The seven tracks are broken up into two subgroups by DGM for ease of burning to CD-R.

If this editor is right, then it confirms that these releases are only available as a download from dgmlive.com, that the front and back covers that are provided in the download (presumably) are to be printed out by the purchaser to place in their own CD case, and that the intent was to allow for listeners to burn the music to personal CD-Rs.

Yes, except there seems to be only one release. The DGMlive release includes the CD covers.
I went and checked on the Wayback Machine for information about this release closer to the date that it was released, the earliest save is from October 2006. Unlike the current site layout, where we have

Venue/Title
Artist
Location
Date

In the old version of the site, the date “comes first”:

I think this explains the discrepancies between the previous entries on MB and even Discogs, where sometimes people choose to put the date before the other information, because that’s how the site used to look.
However, given that the date is separated from the rest of the title with a horizontal rule, and that the url structure is /archive.html?artist=14&show=###, it seems that the date is less part of the title, and more a means of navigating the archive. The first non-date part of the title is the venue name, MDH, separated from the city information by a number of whitespaces. This convinces me more that the title seems to simply be the venue name.

the release group should follow the title of the earliest canonical release (e.g. the CD or any earlier digital releases/covers)

Understood.

Ultimately, I think that I must conclude that because the digital cover art was provided with the work, and that the entries on the website are more archives of events rather than music releases, that I should rely on the naming scheme of the cover art. I am convinced.

Thus, we return to the problem of

OK. Ended up looking on the part of the Style Guide about release titles. I should have probably started there:

If several versions of a title are provided, such as when release title differs between cover and spine, or the track titles differ between the back cover and a booklet tracklist, it’s generally better to follow the more detailed one.

I think this supports a “Soundscapes: MDH, Manchester, UK: December 8, 2005” title.

No, it seems to be one of Robert Fripp’s solo projects.

aerozol · July 10, 2026, 9:57pm

I think I would follow the more detailed title here, especially since he has some other releases where ‘soundscapes’ is on the front cover.

That said, I forgot to mention this before, I think you should be bold - all your suggestions are better than having each title different!