Labels

I've put in the request on the Help page to include the name of any label a particular album may have appeared on. There are a few notes that should be made about this however. The label information will never appear on the website in the album information section for a few reasons. First, label information can be spotty due to the fact that many releases were put out by a band themselves and never appeared on a particular label. An album may have been released on multiple labels over time which makes it hard to choose which to display. An album may have been released by multiple labels at the same time (one does the CD, one the vinyl, or different labels in different countries) and once again which would be displayed? I'd rather not get into a discussion about which label to display, or to display all of them, or whatever since there will always be occasions where an ablum doesn't have a label to display at all so the uniformity of the display can never be maintained (I realize that it is not uniform right now with missing album years, but that is an absolute value that can be determined for every album and we're working on filling in that data).

The label information instead is going to be used in a different sense, I'm going to start working on graphs that can display the interconnectivity of bands based on label association. For example how connected are bands that appeared on Dischord Records vs Relapse Records vs Epitaph, etc. In that sense I'm researching all the releases we have by Dischord and am going back and filling in the relevant data for this specific circumstance instead of the other way around.

This sort of research is only relevant to those smaller labels which deal in specific genres, scense, or geographic locations as opposed to major labels like Epic or Sony which put out whatever people want to hear (or what they want people to hear) so any research on those labels would be meaningless.

Anyway what I'm trying to get at is that we could use label data, it's not of super importance and not worth putting in a ton of effort researching that information, but it would be nice to have. Thanks.


Kevin