How do I work with MB releases that have [no label]?

I have quite a lot of stuff that’s self published and thus on MB has the label value [no label].

In this case, the label field is simply returned blank. This isn’t ideal! I’d like it to say something about it having the [no label] value, not just return an empty field.

If I run the resulting folder through Picard it adds [no label] by default. It also adds the second publisher in the case where there’s more than one publisher, incidentally, but that’s an aside.

I tinkered with rewrite and couldn’t get anything to happen. I did some digging through the code, documentation and fora and all I found was this:

which gives me the feeling this behaviour is just how beets works and always will.

Can I do anything about this aside from manually putting it back in myself?

I don’t mind the tiny bit of extra work but I do predict this becoming a pain if beets starts changing it back to being empty during future operations on my library.

Hello! Could you consider using something like beet modify -a label::^$ label='[no label]' to set every album with an empty label to that string instead?