I just noticed that Dreamers’ Circus page on MusicBrainz uses a different apostrophe character: ’ vs ‘. The official artist pages seem inconsistent (e.g. SoundCloud uses a regular ‘, but on their website they use ’. This causes some issues when scrobbling to last.fm, is there a specific style rule that applies here? Should the MusicBrainz page be changed?
Yep, that’d be Style/Miscellaneous:
Use of basic ASCII punctuation characters such as ' and " is allowed, but typographically-correct punctuation (such as ’ for the English apostrophe) is preferred.
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I think that either directional or simple quotation marks should be applied consistently for all titles irrespective of what was used on the release. An apostrophe is a single closing quotation mark. There is a plethora of alternate symbols in Unicode (script or blackletter typeface, fullwidth Asian/Latin letters, zalgo text) that artists or online distributors now use because they have lost the ability to express design on cover artwork. If all of them are carried over, lists look rather messy. Physical covers may also use directional quotation marks, or sometimes the typeface makes the choice uncertain. If they have used an opening, right facing quotation mark or a “grave accent” in place of an apostrophe, that could be an error from automatic correction during data entry.
Outside of the MB database, I prefer simple quotes for compatibility and appearance in old fonts. But, of course, the Style guide trumps my preference. Consistency, uniform appearance also trumps ultimate correctness. (A case to prove this is the Discogs capitalization that looks normal within the context of that site.)
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