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Topic: CD Albums: Time To Bite The Bullet Pt. 1 The Problem

21st May 2017, 2:45 AM
	RogerFoster To ignore is human, to follow is divine. Member since Jul 2014 3084 Points	Oh Dear. It does seem that our Australian contingent are very concerned about this issue. Personally, in retrospect, after having entered all my CDs here under various "national" categories, I would now designate EVERYTHING as "International". As far as I can see everything is/was potentially distributed/released everywhere in the CD era. When I was entering my CD collection last year there were a number of releases that I assumed were only available in The UK until it was pointed out to me that they were also officially "released" in exactly the same format in other parts of the world (i.e. they were "International"). How is anybody supposed to know this?? One of the first set of CDs I contributed to on this site would have been The Complete Motown Singles Collections ... this is the first one in the series. To begin with these were definitely "US" issues, but then the powers at the British distributors of Motown decided that they wanted to have them "officially" released in The UK (probably because a large proportion of the sales of these collections were in Britain and they wanted a bit of the glory) and from around Volume 5 (1965) onwards these CD collections had an "official" release in The UK. However they are exactly the same release in The UK and The US, so they should really be "International" (although personally I think of them as US Imports). Again ... how is anyone supposed to know this? It seems to me that an important factor here is that 45Worlds is an extension of 45Cat and that the underlying database for both sites probably has the same structure (I worked for 25 years as a database designer so maybe I have a better insight into this than others). In other words, a lot of the assumptions/beliefs/contentions/facts about the worldwide distribution of 45 records have been applied to CD Albums. Back in the good old days of 7" singles (1960s/70s) it was easy to say in which country they were "released", and although US releases were readily available in The UK from around 1969/70 onwards they were always considered to be "imports". In the CD era these distinctions about where CDs are distributed/issued are very unclear. So ... I would suggest scrapping any "national" category (probably impossible due to the underlying database structure of 45Worlds) or alternatively ignoring these "national" categories and introducing new sorting facilities for the individual artists. Incidentally, I have similar issues with Magazines ... but they can wait for the moment!!