Label ownership

Description

This describes a situation where one label is (or was) a subsidiary of another label, during a given period of time. This should be used either to describe the fact a label is a subdivision of another one, or, through corporate acquisition of the former label, has become a subdivision of another one.

ID: 200
Cardinality of {entity0}: Few relationships (0)
Cardinality of {entity1}: Few relationships (0)
Orderable direction: None (0)
UUID: ab7a9be0-c060-4852-8f2e-4faf5b33231e

Link phrases

Forward link phrase: subsidiaries
Reverse link phrase: parent label
Long link phrase: is/was the parent label of

Attributes

The following attributes can be used with this relationship type:

start date

end date

Guidelines

The start date for buyouts is the date of the transaction from which the target label became a subsidiary of the other label. For wholly owned subdivisions, use the subdivision's creation date. The end date may be either the subdivision's end date, or the date of a later sellout/spin-off.

Do not use this relation if the transaction concerns only the rights to reissue (part of) the label's catalog. The same goes when a label buys another one only for its catalog, reissuing the releases but dismantling the former label. Either case should instead use the label reissue relationship type.
Do not use this advanced relationship to attempt to represent facts such as label A owning 0.5% shares in label B's parent corporation. MusicBrainz is not a corporate database, so keep it simple.
Also, do not to break the hierarchy of labels. This should only link between a label and its immediately parent company, not between a label and its top-parent company (or another one somewhere in the scale between), though this may become complicated in some cases.
More complex cases do happen, and labels may change hands a lot of times. Multiple parents for a single label during the same period of time is even possible, such as the case of "shared compilation companies".

Examples

Subdivision created by the parent label:

Fantasy (jazz label active since the 1950s) is/was the parent label of Original Jazz Classics from 1983 until 2004

Label spin-off:

Time Warner (Time Warner Company, was briefly AOL Time Warner from 2001/01–2003) is/was the parent label of Warner Music Group (Warner Music Group Corporation, Holding Co. — File NO releases) from 1990-01-10 until 2004-02-27

Subdivision created by the parent label:

Concord Music Group, Inc. (part of Concord Bicycle Music since 2015/04/01, not for release label use!) is/was the parent label of Fantasy Records (not for release label use! file releases under its "Fantasy" imprint instead) from 2004 to present