When should we consider studio sub-brands to be distinct from the studio itself?

StashDB
1

So I’ve been looking at the entry for MKEros, and I was intending to do an edit to make it a subsidiary studio of The Velvet Dungeon, but it occurred to me that they are not really in fact separate studios! MKEros is simply a brand used by Velvet Dungeon for their fantasy mind control scenes (as opposed to the real hypnosis sessions which are released under the Velvet Dungeon name). MK and VD have separate official websites, but share a Clips4Sale store. There is even already an MKEros scene categorized under the Velvet Dungeon studio entry! On their shared Clips4Sale page, they don’t even seem to disambiguate which label a given scene comes from (other than the MKEROS.com watermark in the video/thumbnail)!

Another studio that does this same exact thing is Entrancement, which releases fantasy scenes under the “HypnoDolls” label on the same storefront as their real hypnosis sessions.

So, is the solution to make MKEros a sub-studio of The Velvet Dungeon, and correct the mis-categorized scene, or is it to remove MKEros and make it an alias instead? Should the same solution be applied to Entrancement/Hypnodolls? There are currently no Hypnodolls scenes (that I can find) in the database, so no precedent has been set for that case yet!

It is rather inconsequential at this time, but I do intend to contribute scenes from both studios that will run into this problem eventually, so it would be good to establish how it should be handled going forward! My personal preference is to use it as an alias, as I believe most people in hypnoporn communities (myself included) would identify scenes from MKEros as being from Velvet Dungeon, and not as a distinct studio of its own.

2

Good question. I’m new to Stash, and don’t yet have a clear opinion on how all sub-brands should be handled. My own collection has many scenes under various Evil Angel sub-brands, even though I would have thought of them as simply Evil Angel scenes. But then, some Evil Angel subsidiaries, such as Rocco Siffredi, almost certainly qualify as studios in their own right.

But so far, it seems that the “Studio” parameter typically refers to websites; a brand that has it’s own website will be labelled as a studio. I find it particularly strange that Dorcel Club & Dorcel Vision are recognized on StashDB as separate studios. As far as I can see, these are just two different services for accessing Dorcel content. Most of the films available on the subscription site Dorcel Club can also be purchased on Dorcel Vision, which also has lots of non-Dorcel content.

I suppose that the distinction between a brand and a subsidiary studio won’t always be very clear, which complicates things. At least for the case of Dorcel, I lean towards removing Dorcel Club and Dorcel Vision as studios, and just putting them under Dorcel.