ResourceGroup hierarchies
Digital releases can come in many structures. They can be the digital equivalents of physical products such as singles, EPs, LPs or CDs and “double albums” or boxed sets of any of these. They can also be digitally-born “mixed media bundles”.
The use of more than one ResourceGroup composite, depending on the release profile that is used, is the means, using the ERN-4 standard, by which the different structures of releases can be effectively described. This is because the ResourceGroup composite enables a record company to describe how the various resources are related to each other and the order in which they make up the release. A simple album, for example, can be described in a ResourceGroup by using the ResourceGroupContentItem composite to describe each resource in the release.
The table below provides an overview of how many ResourceGroup composites are used in the different kinds of releases:
Kind of release | Number of |
|---|---|
Simple audio single | 1 |
Audio album | |
Album with multiple Disks | 1 |
Album with multiple Disks of two sides | 1 |
Classical Album | At least |
Boxed set of several albums or bundles | One (Note that in many cases the contained albums/bundles are also available, separately, as releases.) |
The samples for ERN provide examples for simple albums (the audio and video samples) and a multi-disk equivalent (the mixed-media bundle).