Style: Idiosyncratic capitalization and artist intent for no-label digital releases?

MusicBrainz
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Hello!

Reaching out to request clarification or insight on this topic: In the case of a digital media release where the release title is consistently written in all capitals in store metadata, and there is no text included in the artwork, and it is a “[no label]” release, can it be inferred to be Artist Intent?

My perspective is that particularly when it wasn’t released by a label, it was almost certainly distributed that way on purpose by the artist. And so if it’s consistently written in a certain way in the shop metadata, then the capitalization should be retained, even where if it were a physical release or in digital artwork it would probably have been chosen by the graphic designer rather than the artist themself and thus would be standardized to title case.

I’m mostly interested in this release and recording: Edit #140401294 - MusicBrainz - see discussion on that edit for alternative perspective on it. I don’t really follow the reply - I’m (vaguely) familiar with the wording they cited, though not necessarily the nuances - so figured I’d ask here to try to get more detail. The other user’s edits look like they’re mostly focused on standardizing capitalization, though, so they might have context on this topic that I don’t.

Appreciate any input. Thank you!

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I don’t think the guideline is specifically about whether or not a graphic designer chose all caps. It’s more that all caps can be chosen for aesthetic reasons (e.g. on a CD layout), while still not necessarily meaning that the artist intended to have the tracks canonically TITLED LIKE THIS. Artists can also make purely aesthetic decisions, just like designers.

I think this concept also applies to digital releases, for instance where artists and labels use all caps (I see this a lot on Bandcamp pages) because it looks cool/is a stronger visual look. But when they use the track name within a paragraph on social media they don’t use all caps.

In this particular case though I would also vote for it being artist intent, because one of the artists on this track seems to make varied and quite specific caps choices: ‎Brothel - Apple Music

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That makes a lot of sense, thank you for explaining!

And agreed that a reference to it in running text would make it a lot less ambiguous what they had in mind for the ‘real’ title.

I put a note in the annotation on this one mentioning the funky capitalization which might be the best possible in the absence of something more certain.

Thanks again!