Withdrawn and Expunged releases in MusicBrainz

In a hurry? Here’s what you need to know: We have a new release status in MusicBrainz, “Expunged”.

Expunged is to be used for “previously official releases that were expunged from an artist or record company’s discography”. If the artist or label have not given a clear indication that they want to disown the release, use the “Withdrawn” status instead. See the style guidelines for examples and a longer description.

If you’re not in a hurry, stick around and let’s dig a little deeper.

The history of the withdrawn status is now an interesting one: We discovered that for some time we had conflicting documentation. Some pages of our documentation said to use the withdrawn status when a release is “retired or replaced with a shinier version”, and some explicitly said not to use the withdrawn status in that very same situation.

For those following the “not” version of the guideline, the withdrawn status was to be used with care, and only in cases where the artist or label (or lawyers) had exercised extreme prejudice against a release.

Regardless, the majority of editors simply saw a useful type that seemed to suit the common situation of “I can’t find this release online anymore”, and applied it. Withdrawn has slowly grown to a relatively significant number of releases (3,702/0.1% at the time of writing).

The side effect has been that the withdrawn status does not exclusively represent the extreme cases of “withdrawn” – and questions like “should we hide release groups containing only withdrawn releases from the default artist discography” became more broad and complex.

The solution is (hopefully!) a simple one. The guidelines have been aligned so that the withdrawn status reflects its common usage – it can now be used where an artist or label withdrew or updated a online release, but did not explicitly intend to “disown” the release. And, correspondingly, we have the new expunged status, which accounts for releases that the artist or label really would rather have nobody ever think about again.

An additional note, for those who have stumbled here looking for ways to actually remove factual data from MusicBrainz: that is not possible. Using the expunged status may be your next best option.

That is the end of our tale of two statuses. Have fun with drawing and ex sponging!