So I’ve had Ambient1/ Music for Airports by Brian Eno for about seven or eight years now. In my continuing quest to totally fill my work computer’s hard drive with music, I dreged it up out of the vibro-archives this morning to import it with my iTunes while I worked. Imagine my surprise when I put it in the CD drive and iTunes identified it as Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, another Brian Eno album that predates Music for Airports by five or six years.
Now, in retrospect, I should have suspected something was up a long, long time ago. For one thing, Music for Airports has 4 tracks, none of which have names in English (they’re represented on the CD case with little minimalist drawings), while Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy has 10 tracks with names like “The Fat Lady of Limborg” and “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More.” I had noticed the discrepancies when I first bought the album (“this doesn’t sound anything like the descriptions I read…”) but I didn’t really think anything about it because 1)I liked it and 2) how freaking hard is it to describe a piece of avant garde music? Plus, I didn’t really know anybody who was into Brian Eno who I could ask about it.
The CD was put out by EG Records and distributed by Caroline. Both the jewel case and CD clearly identify it as Music for Airports, but the music is Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Has anyone else ever seen a CD mislabeled like this?
It happens often, usually with CD-singles, indie titles and imports. I assume the digital code on Audio CDs isn’t standardized by the industry in the same way UPCs/barcodes are.
I find it interesting you had the problem with Eno’s Ambient1 / Music for Airports. When I ripped my copy to my HDD several moinths ago, it was IDd correctly. Someone’s probably incorrectly submitted his Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy data to CDDB since then.
The reason I so vividly recall ripping A1 is because of the non-titled (minimalist drawing) track situation you mentioned. (I think I manuually named the tracks Side 1 / Song 1, etc). I guess in the digital age, people will come up with their own titles in such instances.
[Hijack]Speaking of untitled tracks, where & when did the ‘new’ track titles for the Butthole Surfer’s ‘Hairway to Steven’ come from? The original vinyl release in the late 80s had no titles, just sketches of deers shitting and the like.?[/Hijack]
OTOH, the mislabelling problem seems oddly appropriate for Eno’s ambient works… almost as if someone at the label or packaging plant was following the dictates of an Oblique Strategies card! 
I’ve had it happen a couple of times. Very early in the CD era I bought what was supposed to be a Jon and Vangelis album–I forget which one–but the CD played Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire soundtrack. I tried another copy and got the right music. More recently, I bought A Jackson in Your House/Message to Our Folks by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and the CD played Don Cherry’s Mu. Apparently they were all pressed like that.
JohnBckWLD, I’m not sure where those names came from. I never owned the vinyl version of that record! Allmusic.com mentions the “notorious” lack of names on the album.
I told someone who used to be a college radio DJ about this and he said he once got a CD labeled as The Bullet Boys that was actually REM’s Out of Time. He said the record company had sent them out that way on purpose to avoid leaking the album prematurely. Even though that was the pre-internet days, the record companies were still worried about such things. And he said that the measures they took in those days worked about as well as the measures they take today, which is to say, not at all.