Hi Lee, I think incorporating country (or countries) of manufacture into an entry could prove troublesome, as many discs with the same label and catalogue number combination were manufactured in different countries for release in the same country. The original Beatles CDs are good examples - first copies released in Australia by EMI were UK or Europe imports, with Aussie-made copies coming along in the early 90s. I have both EU (Warner Music Manufacturing) and Aussie-made copies of Paul Simon's GRACELAND, both distributed in Australia by WEA/Warner.. The best way I can think of to accommodate your suggestion is to take my own previous suggestion a stage further, in that as well as being able to add multiple release country flags for an item, that the same function be applied to manufacturing country too. Either that, or we go down the Discogs route of creating a separate entry for each variation (GOD, NO!).
Quad5point1 you asked "is international an upgrade?" Depends on how you look at it. If you consider it lets us know that an item has been released in at least one other country/region other than where it was manufactured it's alright. However, if want to actually know where it was released it is not so hot. If you also wanted to catalogue releases from specific countries or regions and they are listed as international you not be able to find them on this site. So the catalogue would be incomplete and inaccurate. Now before you start throwing the furniture at me I'll let you know that I'm also aware that no site in the world has managed to deal with this problem.
The other site (you know the big one) tends to list items based on place of manufacture or country of release. In the modern era this has seen their site produce listings that show items that were released in three places only EU, USA and Japan. This is because production has been centralised to these nations and they also happen to represent how rights have been divided across the globe. Japan is a special case and generally produces products for its own market with an exception being the early years of CD production. So the USA and EU currently produce the bulk of what is available in the world other than local (national) artists. The point is that listing items as either USA or EU is just as inaccurate as listing them as international because their site also does not reflect actually where a product was released other than where it was made.
No-one has managed to crack this problem satisfactorily as far as I'm aware and come up with a system that can handle both the country/region of origin and the places of release. I'd imagine it would be very frustrating for the Mods here having to continually "upgrade" entries to international and most likely annoying to site users that have put in entries to the best of their knowledge and capabilities only to see them redesignated (sorry upgraded) to international.
So the problem we have is that the other site which a lot of us use as a reference does things differently, not better and when that information or the "what's on the tin method" is used to create entries here they don't line up with our guidelines particularly well. When is an upgrade not really an upgrade? When it's international :-)) he he
It would be great if we could incorporate the data for both place of origin and places of release on the same entry without losing one or the other.