Bill wurtz capitalization

The capitalization of releases and recordings by the prolific artist bill wurtz is inconsistent in the MusicBrainz database:

The artist’s name seems to be arbitrarily written as either “bill wurtz” or “Bill Wurtz” across different releases as well.

(I’ll attempt to continue in a followup post since Discourse is limiting me to 10 links.)

2 Likes

I think that artist intent suggests that most (or all?) of these cases should be lowercased:

2.8.22 2:16 pm why do you use lowercase
it’s so deliciously normal

2 Likes

Some of the confusion may stem from other distribution channels:

How should these strings be stylized in MusicBrainz?

(Edit: I wasn’t trying to troll with the post title, honest – Discourse appears to have automatically capitalized the first letter.)

1 Like

It looks like you’ve done your research! And you’ve already identified that the key point is artist intent.

In this case I think you’ve definitely made a strong case for lowercase. I would discount Apple and Spotify altogether (although leaving Apple and Spotify releases themselves uppercase I wouldn’t really take issue with, if someone cares about that, sometimes it is nice to reflect a inconsistency).

I would go ahead and put through the edit/s to change the credits, and see if any conflicting opinions pop up :+1:

p.s. there is a method of changing all the credits to lowercase at once, but first I’d be curious to know if anyone thinks some cases of ‘as printed’ should take precedence, e.g. the aforementioned Apple/Spotify releases

2 Likes

i usually keep releases as “printed” on streaming services if it’s not an obvious mistake (like the distributor forcing Title Case on an acronym or something. clearly just a limitation, and not artist intent).

if it seems plausible that bill wurtz wants his name to be in all lowercase on his less-formal website, bandcamp, youtube, etc., but wants Bill Wurtz on more “official” stores like spotify and itunes (this is what i do with my music), then i would keep it as printed (ideally with two releases: all lowercase and “proper” Title Case). but if somewhere he’s stated or implied “it should always be lowercase. my distributor just won’t let me.” then i would keep the lowercase, and probably consolidate into one release, provided there aren’t other differences of course.

keep in mind though: itunes/apple music will nearly always force Title Case, even when other services won’t. so i would take their titles with a grain of salt

To me, with given elements, it seems a clear artist’s intent, and it should be lower-cased everywhere.

“As printed” doesn’t make much sense on digital platforms anyway, they don’t usually care about artist’s intent …

3 Likes

Thanks for all the guidance! Just to make sure I’m on the right track, do the following edits for the “christmas isn’t real” release group look reasonable?

I’m trying to follow the pattern from the “i’m a princess” release group, which also includes both a release from the artist’s website and a release on streaming services.

3 Likes