Both the Artist entity and the Label entity have an Area field. I believe the style instructions for Artist.Area and Label.Area are not clear enough. I propose to improve them.

I understand that these fields, Artist.Area and Label.Area, were originally Country fields in an earlier database schema. Their purpose was to provide a rough disambiguator, or identifier, for Artists and Labels. Changing them to Area fields permitted identifying more specific associations. However, the project hasn't been clear about taking advantage of this. And, many Artist and Label entries have legacy country-level values in their Area fields.

--STYLE-427-- (2015) generated some discussion and an update to Style/Artist. It revealed disagreement between treating the Area fields as Country fields still, or taking advantage of the possibility of more specific values where appropriate. The new Style/Artist language didn't resolve the issue. This causes forum discussions like https://community.metabrainz.org/t/artist-area-country-vs-city-higher-specicifity/336299/2 , and changes of city values into country values in some cases.

STYLE-816 points out the need for a similar update to https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Label#Country . Making the changes I propose here will resolve STYLE-816 also.

I propose that the Style guide and documentation for both fields be changed to welcome a more specific Area value, likely a city, if available; while also accepting a country-level value if that's what the editor knows. I also propose that we define these fields in terms of "primarily associated with" rather than "born or founded in".

The pages affected are:

• https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Artist#Area
• https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Artist#Area
• https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Label#Country
• https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Label/Country