What to do about Big 'N

While searching for another artist of the same name, I came across

which lead me to

.

The ‘official website’ listed on the event is in a foreign language, so I can’t really tell what it is all about.
But, every artist I opened were all similar to Big 'N - no data other than being added to a list of shows someone attended and maybe a blank setlist.fm page.

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Wow, looks like an awesome list of concerts!

Nonetheless these shouldn’t all be in the same event… I would check in with @dirkvandamme in the edit notes.

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MarCoR is probably a promoter who organized “50²+1 concerts” since 1978. It’s of course not 1 event but a series of dozens of events. They should be split into separate events tied by a series.

Strangely, all more famous bands are missing, e.g. The Offspring, Oasis, The Sex Pistols, Front 242,… - only unknown artists, new to MB have been added, all with an empty setlist.fm reference … to be added later? :confused:

So the only way to remove goofy events like this one is to merge them with other events, or to remove all the relationships and URLs and let the autopruner take care of it? (the only way for regular users – Musicbrainz admins might have other tools at their disposal)

Is anyone working on a plan for removing these events? I might try creating a script to do it.

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So, the idea here is, in order for an artist to have a setlist.fm entry, setlist.fm requires that they have a MBID first, and then the setlist.fm entry is created (automatically? or does a setlist.fm user have to fill out a “create artist” form?). And in order for the Musicbrainz entry to stick around long enough for the setlist.fm thingy to happen, the Musicbrainz entry has to have some attributes (URL, link to another MB entity).

(in case anyone who wants to do this is reading this thread)
I think if someone wants to create a Musicbrainz entry for this purpose, and they’re using a questionable attribute (such as a questionable URL or a bogus event entry) because they don’t have any good info to use, they should return to MB after the setlist.fm entry is created and add a link to the setlist.fm to the Musicbrainz entry, and then remove the questionable attribute they were using as a placeholder.
The end result would be a Musicbrainz entry whose only attribute is a setlist.fm link, and a setlist.fm entry that was based on the Musicbrainz entry (and hopefully would acquire some actual setlists soon after creation). I think that would be an acceptable way to go.

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As I understand it artists have to be manually imported

That’s what I’d do too

Maybe increase the grace period before auto-deletion takes place?

@q_fdb has also been cleaning quite a bit of those Belgian artists added for setlist.fm long before the new URL report existed.

My 2 cents:
Getting the setlist.fm url reverse-linked here is, I guess, the ideal situation and in this case, editor dirkvandamme actually does sometimes take the effort himself to do so (unfortunately more often not). From setlist.fm-users’ perspective it’s more of a courtesy gesture towards MusicBrainz - even if ‘their’ artist gets deleted or merged here, it seems to have no consequences at setlist.fm so they have little incentive to improve their entry here.

From my perspective the most annoying thing about this practice is new artists often being added on a very thin basis (the most basic form of a possible concert listing or mention is sufficient for a setlist.fm entry) which makes it very hard to identify what a certain ‘name of an artist’ stands for, so editors can use the profile for other links/uses with some peace of mind. That problem remains even when the MB-artist gets a setlist.fm reverse-link because at the corresponding setlist.fm entry, you often find the same very vague reference/source for the listed concert, hard or impossible do dig into.

To me it feels like plain text information being upgraded to linked data prematurely, which -depending on the case- leads to new artist mix-ups, high amounts of artists of the same name, typos almost impossible to ever fix, undocumented entries of artist names of only extremely local + temporary “relevance”, etc.

My personal view: as long as setlist.fm requires an MB artist ID, I’d be in favour of increasing the grace period before auto-deletion, allowing setlist.fm users to use the MB artist ID but also reducing clutter artist profiles data at MB. Maybe not an ideal solution but at least better than the bogus MB events and/or bogus artist urls links, which -as earlier mentioned- don’t even always end up getting a setlist.fm entry at all.

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@dirkvandamme added a fake event where there were dozens and leaves a lot work to do!

I didn’t want to make edits when someone else is already looking at it, but it looks like this particular example is a dupe of the other Big’n.

The Marcor site lists the venue as Magasin 4 for ‘this’ Big 'N, and the same show is also on the Big’n setlist.fm page.

A recognisable example of clutter artist profiles getting heaped up here.
Since the linked setlist.fm url of Big 'N leads to a blank/pointless profile over there it seems best to remove this profile altogether rather than merging it.

The dup is not surprising. One of the troubles of “big list” adders like this is they are clearly not caring about quality for MB. So they won’t spend any time with the search. As “Big’n” will not be found in a search for “Big 'N” because of the space then they are not going to spend time checking.

It is also clear they don’t seem to know much about the band either if they didn’t think to try without the space.

It seems strange to me to allow someone to use an “Event” to list the gigs they have seen. And other editors should not be expected to clean up after these people. I would just delete the “event” as it is bogus

I suspect it isn’t a duplicate. f6f581c3-276b-4ad8-84f4-71aafb651d77 is a Chicago rock band that reportedly disbanded in 1997.

The Marcor site (and the setlist.fm) site appear to be for concerts in Europe in this century. I’d wager it’s some European artist I’ve never heard of.

None of this, however, is an argument for keeping that worthless entry (038e6542-0cfe-45a4-87a9-8e13f297e470) in Musicbrainz.

Okay, I take it back. Apparently the Chicago band re-formed around 2010, and then started doing European shows.
With minimal knowledge of French (and 3 years of HS Spanish), I was able to decipher some details from this French article:

Yeah, based off the Magasin 4 show photos I found it looked like the Chicago band :thinking:

I’m just going to go ahead and merge this example, because I’m impatient! This thread/setlist.fm discussion will live on fine without the dupe.

I don’t see the harm in merging as usual?

But the merge is open for voting here if anyone thinks it’s a bad idea.

Maybe I should have just asked to have the title of this topic changed, but instead, I created a separate topic specifically about the abovementioned bogus events (or bogus events in general)

No real harm, but merging will cause the destination artist to inherit the pointless/blank setlist.fm profile of the dupe artist, that’s all.

Well, I kind of hoped that the good people of MB would realize that I was talking about more than just one artist. But in case they didn’t -

Big N is how I found the issue. The point of the forum post was:
I wanted to know if we should be deleting a large portion of the 15,000 artists the user created.
And if yes, is it something we need to do manually, or can admin just ‘zap’ them.

Improper events. Artists who have just an event listing, or the previously mentioned setlist.fm.
With almost no real way to find out anything more about any of these unknown local artists.
It’s a big job if we decide to look and remove them all.

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Certainly not every artist he created should be removed - he also added a number of artists with more care, but his 42 events could be looked at & deleted (if agreed upon, some of them are more ‘real’ than others), leaving a considerable number of artists orphaned of any other relations, auto-deleting them shortly after?

I only opened a handful. But they were all that same style - artist, event, setlistfm.
But, we have to go through them all to see which ones may be at least salvageable.

If they have a setlist.fm link, they would not be orphaned.

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Indeed. Many have a setlist link, but also many don’t (half of them, maybe?)
So it would at least get rid of those automatically.