Hi,
I am working in a study about the number of non-featured artists in a regular track/song (typically, participants,musicians or back-up vocalists). In this sense, I would like to ask you if it would be possible to access to this information because I´ve been reviewing the available data and I´ve found it.
Thank you very much in advance!
Hi!
I guess that depends a lot on what you consider non-featured. Often, if a band is credited for the track, you’ll have relationships with its members on each recording - that is different than the artist in the credit, but still not really a guest of any kind.
It’s also highly dependant on what information people have added; much as we’d like every recording to list everybody who contributed in any way, the majority of the database only has “Artist (feat. Artist)”, and almost all of the rest only has who’s listed in the booklets and not the roles that didn’t make it into the credits, just because each step of research takes so much longer than the previous. If you can find what you’re looking for, great! Just know that there is no guarantee of completeness on the data.
Thank you very much for your answer reisarevok, WovenTales.
Effectively it is very difficult to find this information. I´ve seen that Allmusic offers a very deep information about the background vocalists and musicians in a specific song. For example, checking Shape of you, a famous track by Ed Sheeran as main artist, it´s possible to obtain the participants
But it implies a manual query for each track/song, which is not efficient at all.
In this sense I wondered if it is not possible to obtain this kind of information in a more automatic way through any platform, but up to now I am not able to do it.
Thanks again
You’re free to download the entire MusicBrainz database and do SQL queries against it to find the information you want/need, with the caveats that @reosarevok and @WovenTales already mentioned.
I just want to point out — Allmusic is a dreadful site. Full of errors, duplicates, and omissions.
But also, “non-featured” performers means different things to different people.
Depending on what you specifically mean, a site like Allmusic doesn’t list non-featured performers, or, again, depending on what you mean, it is a list of the non-featured performers.
I only bring this up because one of the music unions has a list of unclaimed royalties by “non-featured performers” due to a change in some copyright laws. They are typically studio employees/musicians who get a weekly salary regardless of if they record with someone or not, and really are only recording on a particular song because it was (as example) Tuesday at 2pm, which was their assigned time to be available each week. And therefore were previously not entitled to a credit or a royalty - especially when the next day, it was someone else doing the same job. And you may not know who’s actual “track” was the one that was used.
You’ll find many previously “nameless” people being credited with performances because of the law change.