Artist with social media only

I came across an artist entry for Wolfson. It was created in 2016 and has no releases or recordings, only a link to the band’s Facebook page. The FB page was last updated in 2016 and gives no indication of recordings. It seems to be a local band that is possibly no longer in existence.

Is this worth keeping? Does MB have a ‘notability’ criterion? Do we want to keep something like this indefinitely in case they do something in the future?

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I’m on the fence about this. I’ve witnessed many band entities like what you’re describing: someone, usually a band member, manager, etc., adds and artist and their social media links, but no releases, recordings or events. As tempting as it may be to remove them, I have occasionally had to link them to an Event they appeared at (usually a festival, but sometimes a small-scale concert where a local band served as opening act). There are many bands that never put out any releases but they do play live events. Something to consider…

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They obviously played live a few times by the photos in there, so I see no reason to remove it. Ideally we’d have more info, but eh.

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You may be interested in the previous discussion here:

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Thanks. That discussion mainly focused on recordings/releases but it seems like a similarly inclusive spirit applies to artist entries as well. To paraphrase reosarevok, it needs to exist, and we should be able to prove it exists.

There’s spam potential for an artist listing that consists only of a link to an official homepage, as the domain could expire and be replaced with something irrelevant and possibly inappropriate. But that’s only hypothetical; it wouldn’t apply in this case since the link is a FB page.

Taking the hypothetical one step further: suppose Wolfson were to delete their FB page, which is the only piece of data we have about them today. Would we still keep the entry in MB for possible future use?

I’d say yes. They still existed and they were still active to some degree. Ideally someone would eventually enter the events they performed at, but even without, just knowing that they existed is better than not knowing that they existed.

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