Hallo Johannes Weißl: > Hello Wieland, > > thanks for the reply, I was wondering why there was so little discussion > when I brought up the topic! > > Bandcamp is the one of the many digital fake labels that probably > qualifies the least for being used as "label" in the MB sense: It is > "just" a software product / service to easily maintain a website and > upload/sell music.
If you rephrase that to "It's a company providing the means to set up a catalog of music you produced and distribute it" you're pretty much at the definition of "distributor" [0]. > With the same logic you could add Paypal, the LAME > MP3 encoder or PHP as label (all somehow involved in the distribution > or production of the release). Indeed you could. But then again, their main purpose is clearly not to distribute music. > > > > A record company typically manages imprints, and coordinates the > > > production / manufacturing / promotion / relations with artist / PR / > > > distribution of sound recordings. Record companies may directly handle > > > one or more of these aspects, […] > > Your cited paragraph says "A record company typically ...". You can't > logically deduce from that statement "Something is a record label if > ...". It is a vague description what record labels usually do, not a > definition. But you have to admit, Bandcamp looks a lot like a duc^Wlabel :-) > As I already wrote in the original post, record labels themselves can > use Bandcamp to sell music, which is a good indication that it is > clearly not a label. I only see that as an indication to use the label type "distributor" [0]. > Even CD Baby, which does far more than Bandcamp (assigns UPC numbers, > sells physical releases, ...) stated multiple times that they are not > a record label [1]. By their definition - the MusicBrainz definition of "label" does not even include the word "barcode" once. > I see that people want to store information about the distributor (or > even distribution software here) for exclusive releases, but there are > other ways of doing it: tags, annotation and (if appropriate) release > comments. Again, I'm not talking about exclusives like some Best Buy edition or anything, I'm talking about releases where Bandcamp is the only one (except for the artist) involved in distributing the release. > The problem why we maybe have fake labels for physical releases is the > blurry distinction between "label" (as "imprint/logo on back cover") and > "record label". So people add any logos happily as labels, and with our > definition it is not really a mistake either. > > For digital releases however we don't have such logos, and MP3 files > often only contain Copyright (C) remarks, but not anything similar to > our "label" field. But what is the difference between some picture on the (back) cover and the artist saying "Bandcamp is the official at which you can get my music" or "I am distributing my music through Bandcamp"? [0] http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Label/Type -- Wieland
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