This doesn’t surprise me, since it was posted as a link leaving Reddit, without any explanation posted to Reddit.
I am not usually a Reddit user, you might have guessed 
Thanks to @IvanDobsky for helping tidy up the On a Friday page btw! Would be nice to see some of the super fans on this thread get involved…
I don’t understand why you think Reddit is a better place to get a response than a music community? 
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More specifically, I think a Radiohead fan page/group is a better place for Radiohead history knowledge.
The fans are not really biting so I guess we just keep going in circles here ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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I assume this relationship type is meant for entities of the same type only and not for something like a group changing its name to a person or vice versa:
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/89006709
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Yes. Although that relationship might be correct in itself, if it pointed to a band artist and not the person?
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It’s pointing to the person who also happens to be a member. Hence my curiosity.
If this relationship type is meant for intentional renames and not forced ones, e.g. for legal reasons, perhaps this needs to be better explained in relevant documents:
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This relationship explictly needs to be defined in guidelines or either removed entirely. There are so many recent merges that have passed that killed off MBIDs that are 10+ years old from well-known artists. add (edit #15565701) / merge (edit #107119387)
The only applicable band for this relationship seems to be On a Friday/Radiohead, since that’s mentioned in the documentation. the rest are completely arbitrary. Unless it’s clearly defined, we will have artists merged and being re-added over and over again.
There’s three options I can see for a future guideline. My personal preference is #1, since it does not break the expected behavior of the sort name field, which will always sort the name by the main name, not what you would normally expect a completely different band name to be sorted as. This could be changed, a “override default sort name” checkbox could be added to aliases, for example, but I think it’s the least technically difficult solution to implement.
- The artist guideline should be updated with “if a group changes its name to a name that isn’t a variation of the previous name, two artists should be added and the renamed into relationship should be used, even if the lineup is identical.”
- The relationship should be deprecated and merging should be enforced in guidelines unless there’s a clear lineup change.
- Same as 2 but with the relationship kept and only used for the cases where there’s a clear lineup change (this would mean that the only guideline canonical example, Radiohead/On a Friday, is not to be kept separate). If you want another distinction than lineup change or do not think that lineup change is important, please vote none of the above and write your distinctions in a reply.
- Option 1
- Option 2
- Option 3
- None of the above (please reply with your ideal solution)
0
voters
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How I personally decode this…
I don’t think it is just about a line-up change. It is how the band see their old self. “On A Friday” was when they were kids at school. “Radiohead” is the band they started after school and signed a record deal. A separate project.
If a band talk on their own history page about how they “renamed from XYZ because of reasons” then that feels more like an alias and a natural name change.
I see “renamed to” is more about a separate project. A reason to separate the discographies. More of a “reformed into”.
If a band lists their “first album” as the one they did using that other name, then that is a reason to merge into one entity.
The Artist page should represent how the Artist sees themselves - “Artist Intent”.
Not everything can be covered by a black and white guideline.
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Allow me to plea for a guideline that is enforceable both for well known groups, such as Radiohead, and for groups a whole 3 people have heard about (without editors being expected to earn a PhD in history of that band to make a correct edit). So option 1 it is for me.
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This is very explicitly defined: “This describes a situation where an artist (generally a group) changed its name, leading to the start of a new project.”
So, the existence of this relationship is entirely irrelevant to whether an artist should be merged or not. The decision needs to be taken as it always is, as per the artist guidelines: “is this the same artist or a separate project”. If the former, you should merge in any case. If the latter, you shouldn’t have merged either way but this allows you to connect the two.
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What? Options 1, 2 and 3 would cover absolutely everything with very few ambiguities. There would not be any need for distinctions that at the end of the day, will be made by the few people who are currently actively in generally voting on edits, not people who are experts on the bands making an informed decision based on a vast amount of information and their intent.
The different project distinction is completely arbitrary. Edit #107178913 was a revert from a ban evader but it’s the best demonstration of the issues. Here, the band keeps separate Bandcamp pages, lists old releases under the name it was originally released as and the label lists the two names as separate projects. Yet, it was merged.
In this case, there is explicit intent that they just changed their name. They put out a magazine ad saying that it’s just a name change.
How is that different from Gamma Ray being merged into Queens of the Stone Age? How is Teen Suicide and American Pleasure Club, who have different Bandcamp pages considered less than a different project than a band who directly said “we changed our name to Radiohead”.
There is an explicit need for a clearer guideline. There is no way you can look at that ad and say that the single case singled out by the guideline is a special case, if the other ones that have recently passed are. salo.rock put it very concisely.
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I’d just like to add that I don’t want to attack any editors who have been doing these merges and that any edits linked are not meant to be call outs for bad editing. They’re just doing what they think is the best, but nobody can currently agree on what that is. The edits linked aren’t wrong, they also aren’t right, since the current definition is too vague.
I default to voting no on these merges (in some cases, the relationship was not even added and the merging editor did not know about it until I left a note, given that it’s not in the artist guideline) unless a very strong reason is given, and even then I would vote abstain and not yes unless I feel like I personally know and care enough about the artist to know that a different project merge is appropriate.
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@finalsummer I won’t be the one to sit and debate this. But the key I focus on is “Artist Intent”. If the artist does not want the stuff from their school days to appear in their discography, then that is their choice.
I have no idea about the other bands you talk about. So cannot comment on them. I just notice you are skirting around the key phrase in the guidelines about “leading to the start of a new project” which is not included in your 1,2,3 choices. (Your option 3 doesn’t even read cleanly as it starts - “3. Same as 3”)
My point is in any case that you seem to be conflating two issues: one is when to merge artists, and the other is when to use this relationship.
The answer to the second question is “when artists shouldn’t be merged, but there’s a rename”.
The answer to the first question is a lot more open, but it has nothing to do with this relationship and as such having it here muddles the discussion. What you actually want is a post “when are two incarnations of a band the same project”.
If after that discussion it turns out the Radiohead case should be merged, then that just means the example here needs to be changed 
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Both of those two issues are related and were discussed here long before your reply. I’m happy to make a new thread, which might get more eyes/votes if I include a poll in the start of the thread, but I did not feel the need to do so originally because I felt like “when to merge or use relationship” was the implicit topic of this thread after the relationship was added.
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I must say I do appreciate all releases of any particular project to be grouped together on a single page, both on MB and LB. I think that has some obvious utility.
But the back-and-forth is indeed happening. Current example: merge edit vs. opposite-edit. And it’s of course a complete waste of human effort (on both sides).
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