What to do when an album name officially changes?

MusicBrainz
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Not sure how to resolve this situation, as it’s the first I’ve seen, but also know it’s not unheard of. Would love some guidance on how to edit this without messing anything up.

An artist seems to have officially changed the name of an album, retroactively. The release in question: https://musicbrainz.org/release/7c5a2f6b-f4c1-4a84-b018-36aa6f4b00d7

The official listing, and seemingly only official place to get said release: https://photay.bandcamp.com/album/1st

Discogs has updated their listing from original title “Photay” to new title “1st”: https://www.discogs.com/release/6105599

Now, I would assume it would be okay to just change the title of the release to match the new title, and add a note in the Annotation field about the original title. However, I understand that sometimes the distinction between Release, Release Group and things like that can complicate matters. Would love some input from my fellow editors.

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It’s not an option I personally use much, but you can give releases aliases. So one option would be to change the name to the new name and add the old one as an alias that’s no longer in use.

It’s probably too late to find out if the artwork changed too. If the artwork did change, I would make a separate release with a different name in the same release group. This album has been out for a while, but I don’t know when the change was made. There may be a lot of people with outdated tags. I’m a bit on the fence whether that would be enough for a separate release.

Whatever you do, it is probably a good idea to add an annotation with information about the release title change. Things get lost in edit histories, and not everybody always checks them anyway.

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perhaps this is the old man in me talking…

Release names don’t change.
There can be a new release (re-release, 2nd edition, anniversary edition, etc). But once it is out there, it is out there,

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That argument would make sense for physical releases. On Bandcamp, though, it’s less clear.

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First, rename the release group to “Photay / 1st”. This is a convention we can use when an album has been released under more than one title. (Here’s an example.)

Don’t rename the original 2012 release. As @justcheckingitout pointed out, it was known only as Photay for eight years. All references to it are by that name. In 2012, Photay had no album called 1st.

Instead, treat the retitle as a reissue: Create a new release, and set the release date to the date of the retitling. (You can omit the day and even the month if you don’t have a reliable source for those).

I think 1st is a suitable search-hint alias for the original 2012 release, since the current Bandcamp page is ambiguous. I say this because the original Bandcamp URL redirects to the retitled page, but the retitled page has the old release date. That’s confusing for listeners, but we can help by doing our part.

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This makes it sound like a combination of 2 releases, though. I would rename the release group to the current name, like we do with artists. Plus the alias and maybe a disambig

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Also add lots of notes to the annotation about this name change. Details of this unusual history.

I agree with people above - this is a “reissue” with a new name, but in same Release Group. It existed for 8 years with the original name.

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This is perfectly put - we can track these kinds of (very interesting) changes even if it is a digital release.

Edit: according to the wayback machine the cover was the same

Edit 2: The way that the Wayback machine stops tracking the first url (/photay) at the end of March 2017, and then picks up the second url (/1st) at the same time, might be a quite precise indication of when it changed?
https://web.archive.org/web/changes/https://photay.bandcamp.com/album/photay
compared to
https://web.archive.org/web/changes/https://photay.bandcamp.com/album/1st

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I have another case of an album changing name. Must have happened in the last few days.

The release was originally added from The Haunted Tapes | Witchorious , which now redirects to The Haunted Tapes | Witchorious . It is still the same release entry on Bandcamp, but the name (and with it the URL) changed and it got new cover art. Track listing and release date are unchanged.

We could add this new naming as a new release. I’m unsure when exactly this name change happened. But it was just recently, on December 4th it still was the old name. The metadata embedded into the HTML even shows a dateModified of “2023-12-09T14:51:51+00:00”. So it might have changed today.

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I think it’s true regardless of format. If the name of a release changes, then there’s a new release.

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IMO the original release with the old name should be set to Withdrawn as well, since it was effectively pulled and replaced.

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Withdrawn as it was withdrawn. I would also expect to see non overlapping date ranges and new artwork

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Thanks for all the feedback!

Took me a while, but here we go:

I made the edits votable. What do you think about the release group name? Update or keep the original? I’m in between.

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I would lean towards renaming the release group to the new name and adding a disambiguation to the entire group like “originally released as Witchorous.”

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