Re: [mb-users] Artist vs. Artist and His Orchestra

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 11:25 AM, Alex Mauer <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 08/30/2012 06:49 PM, Brian Schweitzer wrote:
> > What I think could work, though, is using the performance ARs, as I
> > think you're suggesting symphonick.  You could also extend it to any of
> > the performance and engineering ARs: remixed by, engineered, etc.  That
> > would certainly make the releases/release groups tabs more useful for
> > all the engineers, remixers, DJs, etc. who currently have blank pages,
> > with all the relevant stuff for them instead buried on the ARs tab.
>
> +1, this would be great regardless of the subject issue.
>
> What does this mean for “Artist vs. Artist & His Orchestra”, though?
>
> If this were implemented, would we want to merge them, or not?
>

I think it's a side issue to that question.  It addresses how to get
"Artist & His Orchestra" releases to list on "Artist"'s page (as well as
the pages for the members of that orchestra).

With specific regard to merging, I'd repeat my objection to doing that.
 "Artist & His Orchestra" is not the same thing as "Artist".  This I would
think a similar situation to the (very obscure/unknown guideline here) Band
With Main Performer Name guideline [1] - think of Marilyn Manson the
person, vs Marilyn Manson the group.  We keep those separate for good
reasons; I think we should keep these separate for the same reasons.

We have two apparently different types of artists here.  The first is
artists whose name looks like a collab, but where that actually is the
group's name.
Examples:
a) "Bob Marley & the Wailers" - there was no "the Wailers" at that time;
the band was "Bob Marley & the Wailers", and included Bob as a member.
b) "Davy Jones & The Lower Third" - again, there was no "The Lower
Third"; David
Robert Jones (aka David Bowie, aka Davy Jones) was 'merely' a member, not a
collaborator with some separate group.
There's other examples in the mentioned
http://musicbrainz.org/tag/do%20not%20split/artist

Second, there's the "Tom Foo & His GroupType" artists.  I'd suggest that
these really are the same as those mentioned above, except that it's easier
to see that "His Orchestra" isn't a standalone group, compared with
something like "The Lower Third".

Personally, I think the best solution at the moment is to keep these
separate, and as "group" type, with some notation such as that specific tag
to indicate that this is not an artist which would be proper to split.  The
only difficulty would be the mentioned "not showing those releases on the
person artist's page issue, and there I think we'd have to ask for server
support.  But even without that server support happening immediately, I
think that's the more correct and more flexible solution, vs just merging
and creating all those accompanying problems/limitations/erronious data.

Brian

[1] http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Band_With_Main_Performer_Name

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