In the title of this book, the name "encyclopedia" might be a slight misnomer. Instead of making a formal claim to historical fact, what I present is my research, very much in process. Much is drawn directly from the records (including 95 percent of the logos), with large amounts of help from the websites Discogs, Wikipedia, and Google Translate. Even though I've expanded the entries from 142 (first edition) to 230 (second edition) to 789 (the third edition you are reading now), this list is still by no means complete, nor likely 100 percent correct. It's pieced together from clues on the backs of record covers and in the footnotes of websites, tips from friends, advertisements in Sing Out! (a quarterly journal of folk music), flyers slipped into album sleeves, and my own extrapolation from music-related Wikipedia entries in a dozen different languages. That said, it is organized as a reference book. It's not intended to be read from cover to cover, but to be bounced around in; each time you pick it up, I hope it provides a new nugget of useful or fascinating information. There were infinite ways that this book could have been organized, but I eventually decided on alphabetical order as the most simple and straightforward.

There is an alphabet guide on the far right of each page spread to help you get around. While in the English language we tend to put modifiers after nouns (i.e., Cobblestone Records), in other languages the modifiers come first (i.e., Disques Pavé). I've alphabetized based on how the label is written in its own language; so in the previous example, Disques Pavé is under D. If a label didn't tend to use the modifier, I didn't either.

For instance, Discos Pentagrama was a small Mexican folk label active in the eighties, but its name is almost always written simply as "Pentagrama," so I've placed it under P. I've used the same logic for acronyms. If a label is primarily known by its acronym--such as EGREM from Cuba-- I've left it as such. If not, I've written out the full name. Lastly, just as in English the articles "the" and "a" are ignored when alphabetizing things, I've done the same with foreign-language articles (e.g., "el/la" and "un/una" in Spanish). While not intended to be read front to back, this book should still be interesting to read in chunks, where you can really start to see patterns and overlapping information.

If you simply use it as a reference, you might not get to see just how many European Communist parties released records to support electoral campaigns, or how many labels across the globe released Chilean music as an act of solidarity after the fascist coup in the country in 1973. It is through this macro lens that some really compelling political ideas take shape, which is why the index (new to this edition) is so important. Give it a skim to see just how many people, movements, and ideas overlap and are connected to multiple labels.