Work publishers and international sub-publishers

MusicBrainz Style
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As you may all know, most every composition still under copyright is published by some sort of publishing entity (label). These publishers only have reach over certain geographic regions, so they have to rely on local sub-publishers to administer the rights to these works for them. A lot of these sub-publishers have the same company name as their foreign parent with some local variation (usually the local equivalent of “Inc.” or “Ltd.” at the end). Some editors have been adamant these sub-publishers should not be listed at all, but I disagree for a number of reasons:

  1. Some works are created by two or more artists residing in different countries and associated with different rights societies.
  2. The list of publishers will vary between different releases containing recordings of the same work (and by this I mean international variations, not variations that occur over time with name changes and merges and the like).

So, should sub-publishers be listed or not? I made a STYLE ticket to add the sub-publisher relationship 3 years ago but it got stalled in committee.

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I don’t know if this merge edit was right or wrong but we should keep all the publishers, including local sub publishers.

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Adding a sub publisher would be fine but everything about works needs to be consolidated.
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Artist_Credits notes that “Artist credits should generally follow the actual credit used on the release / track, including the join phrases.”

So for writing credits you want to use a release note for for publishers you don’t?
Now the you are requesting that Publishers should not follow this rule. Why yes for one and no for the other?
JASRAC shows the sub-publishers, as does GEMA. The list will be never ending…

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There is nothing shocking treating works differently than artist credits which is used on tracks and releases.
Tracks and release, we like them yo be like actual releases, while works and recordings, they may be used on many releases.

3 Likes