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Topic: Inconsistencies In The International Category

11th Dec 2015, 1:27 PM
	PhilMH SUBS Member since Jan 2012 1058 Points	Globalisation is certainly the main thing, and I've mentioned many times before how Australian record companies (and no doubt many other countries) received discs pressed in other countries before factories were established, and this still goes on to some extent, mostly with back catalogue and more "marginal" forms of music (jazz, blues, etc). It is also possible that a company's reorder of a particular item may come from a different country than its initial order, I have heard of, say, EMI receiving an initial batch of discs from Germany, but the reorder being filled from Belgium, as EMI's central ordering/warehousing/whatever department just filled the order from wherever there was stock available. As well as that, it can be hard to tell whether an item retailed in Australia is actually "released" here by a licensee, or just imported by an import distributor - I think Lee had this issue with something distributed in Australia by Shock, who have fulfilled both of the roles that I have just mentioned for different US labels. So, I am beginning to think that Dr. Doom might be on the right track in wondering whether we should have the country field at all, and just stick to catalogue number and barcode. The alternative use of the country field would be country of manufacture, which would be potentially more misleading, especially for earlier CD issues (think of discs made in Japan for US release) or particular labels (UK Decca's classical issues made in Germany with the London label for the Americas, because of the then-split ownership of the Decca name). I also think that we should use the barcode as the primary match, as formatting of catalogue numbers has varied between regions and pressing dates, for example, US PolyGram in the 90s tended to use most of the barcode as the catalogue number, whereas Europe and elsewhere used a shorter version, like Marvin Gaye's WHAT'S GOING ON was 31453-0022-2 in the US and 530 022-2 in Europe. WEA/Warner Music in Europe also tended to format the numbers differently from the US. Those catalogue number differences can be reflected in the additional catalogue number fields, along with any additional catalogue number that may only have applied for a certain country (a lot of EMI CDs carried a shorter UK number as well as the CDP xxxxx one). Any information (or strong belief) about where a particular disc was or might have been released can be entered in the comments, along with release date information, which could vary significantly from one country to another. Are there any instances of CDs having the same barcode but different track listings and/or album titles? It sometimes happened with LPs that a track listing was reconfigured or album title changed because of a hit single, and it is entirely possible that happens/happened with CDs too. So, we need to think about how to handle those if they occur - I'm undecided at the moment!