Artist credit in musical theatre [theatre], add artist, or "and chorus"

[fmera]

thks for the prompt

to add to that, i’ll try to explain the reasoning from my point of view, since the present theatre guidelines don’t actually say what’s the best practice in cases like these.

1. since all SPAs are merely placeholders and don’t really point to any particular known artist whether you tag such credits to an SPA or not, i reckon that if you don’t need to resort to SPAs to set a credit for any recording (or other entity), then it’s probably better to just dispense with their use, and that’s because…

2. if you assign a credit like “Chorus” to [theatre], it only gets aggregated to the long list of artist credits already associated with that SPA. beyond that, it goes no further to ascertain who are that group.

3. another alternative, which some might have considered, is to piggyback such credits onto one or more preceding known artists in those particular recordings, let’s say crediting Alfred Drake as “Alfred Drake and Chorus”. but this approach has one drawback; it adds an inappropriate artist credit to Alfred Drake’s list of aliases, since that’s a name you’d not likely imagine Drake himself to have ever used, or that it was an artist group of which he was a member. it’s just an ad hoc ensemble.

so, if the conditions allow it, i feel we can dispense with tagging these credits to any SPAs, and only resort to them when we have to.