This reminds me of MusicBrainz, whose database stores "release groups", e.g. the album Nevermind by Nirvana is one, which can have hundreds of "releases", as different media (tape, CD, LP, promo, ...), different countries, later re-issues, etc. [0]

Sometimes these have different catalogue numbers or barcodes to distinguish them, sometimes they don't but they're still different. I've seen releases where the only difference is the label in the centre of the LP, or the back of the CD case has a two-column tracklisting vs a one-column tracklisting. Music publisher uses the same code and says it's identical and yet it's clearly not.

Then there's the "recordings" on an album, which even if they're never re-recorded can still end up chopped up, bleeped or remastered. They're not the same sound. MusicBrainz likes to track when they are exactly the same recording (e.g. the LP recording of a song appearing on a compilation album verbatim) and when they're not (e.g. radio edits of the LP recording). And if we're going beyond recordings by one artist of "their" song, i.e. cover versions, or just plain standards, those are "works", with composers, lyricists, and can be recorded thousands of times by different artists...

I greatly appreciate the pedantry and flexibility for noting down when creative works are the same versus where they differ, in relational database form.

[0] https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/1b022e01-4da6-387b-865...