What I wish to emphasize, as I did in my edit note, Berlin has a very special place on the European cultural map and for many years has functioned as a haven for multinational artists, especially operating in the experimental areas.
I believe this is exactly one of these cases and this NYC artist chose to move specifically to Berlin for the above reasons, not just any German city.
The area field has nothing to do with WHY the artist is living there, and everything to do with their current operating country (or most associated country if they’re deceased/disbanded).
I provided meaningful arguments that some artist do associate themselves with specific places. I have added hundreds of artists with location data as specific as possible. Data that is readily available, often by the most reliable source - the artists themselves. Actively choosing to generalize this is simply lost data imo.
I agree with Skeebadoo. Artists are based in a town and often get proudly associated to that town. These examples are not working all over that country, but in one location. I often set the town for an artist. This also means that the country can still be derived from it.
What concerns me about removal of accurate information is that the is no place this will stop. Germany will next be replaced by Europe.
This is a database about accurate data. I don’t see the logic at blurring that data to make it more vague.
Deleting these details means you can’t now find “bands from Berlin”. Surely this is why the Area field allows details and not just a plain list of countries?
I think you pick a good example there. They are termed as being “The Liverpool Sound”. Similar with Pulp from Sheffield. They were very separate to anything coming out of London.
Also the whole Madchester music scene of the 1990s. The fact these were Manchester bands is VERY important to the music style. Changing them to “United Kingdom” would not make any sense. They have zero connection to Scotland. It was about that small concentration of area where these bands were influenced an always made their music. Oasis is Manchester - not UK.
Maybe people from outside of the country do not understand the regions of a different country. But this should not mean destroying that data for those that do.
MusicBrainz is a brilliant database that can be combed for data with clever searches. We should not be loosing that richness of data knowledge. Countries can still be found when an area includes a town name. More detail is surely always king?
Not really because an artist could be born or founded in one area and move to a different location to create their music. Just like in @Skeebadoo’s example of someone moving to Berlin for inspiration. Music is not always about a place of birth. But music can very much be about location it is created in.
Note “created” and not “perfomed”. This is not about where someone does concerts, but about where their ideas come from when walking the streets of their home.
The main thing that puzzles me is why remove data? Why remove details? A country is still there in a place name, but the town means much more to the people who live in that country.
The biggest issue I have is not even for stylistic purposes. The issue is, json results for artist page will NOT show country when a city is used as the area. Unless the city has an ISO-3166-2 code (which very few do, as they are for state/subdivision). For example, Mobb Deep only shows Queensbridge, not United States or US-NY: https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/d75d1f08-bbb8-4eae-9877-399ca9121197?inc=aliases&fmt=json
This is my reasoning for sweeping changes to area. Admittedly, Berlin has an ISO code, so I’m not sure why it wasn’t showing on MB json.
Applications that use MB data, such as Plex, use the json form for all their data. So when the json doesn’t display a country, Plex will not be aware of the country.
IMO we should not downgrade data to fit structural limitations that can be changed later. I believe this is already the MB stance for some similar situations.
Errr… sorry, but database coding errors should not be a reason to remove data to fit your JSON results. Whack a ticket in. Change your code. Please do not destroy data. PLEX needs to change how it queries the database. If you have a Plex bug then fix it in PLEX.
I don’t understand JSON, but do understand quality of data. I know which I think should take priority. Agree with @aerozol’s comment above
I agree with @Skeebadoo’s Edit #75174046 that this artist is better described by a value of “Berlin” than “Germany” for location. I agree with @aerozol and @IvanDobsky that as a design principle we should not degrade the quality and specificity of data in MusicBrainz in order to work around current limitations in other tools; we should improve the other tools.
An underlying problem is what @reosarevok said earlier in this thread, on 13. October 2017:
My belief is (from STYLE-855):
I understand that these fields, Artist.Area and Label.Area, were originally Country fields in an earlier database schema. Their purpose was to provide a rough disambiguator, or identifier, for Artists and Labels. Changing them to Area fields permitted identifying more specific associations. However, the project hasn’t been clear about taking advantage of this. And, many Artist and Label entries have legacy country-level values in their Area fields.
I would love to see discussion on STYLE-855 get some traction. I have proposed specific edits there. They are three years old. I can review them and make any necessary updates if that is helpful.
