It's more of a UI and naming issue. Before the "organization" entity was conceived, we had a simple text field in the album submission page to denote "publisher".
Then we created "organizations" and "organization-album relationships". Basically the functionality you're thinking of -- linking any arbitrary number of organizations to the album entry, each with a different "role" -- is already present in the "manage links" page. We never updated the original publisher text field though. Perhaps it's time to replace it with an "add organization" mechanism.
We also haven't expanded beyond the three roles that we provided ("publisher", "distributor" and "imprint"). Plus "imprint" is actually more of an organization *type* rather than the organization *role*, so we should rename that. I agree with the suggestions made so far:
Imprint => Label
Publisher => Manufacturer
Also, there's the bug where an imprint/label won't show up as linked unless we add a publisher as well, which shouldn't be necessary. (For the sake of having the album entry show up in the parent company page, we'd have to link the parent company as well, but this can be automated and invisible).
And finally we should do away with merging all the organization names into a single "publisher" field in the album info display and split out the roles like we do with artists.
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