Dan Gibson's Solitudes New Age Music - Who is the Artist

Hi all,

I am one of those possibly odd individuals who will often listen to various bits of New Age music - for the unitiated this is “nice” music that is kind to your ears, lots of flowing melodies, often interlaced with nature sounds and is often intended to relax the listener, or be used in calming scenarios like mediation.

Dan Gibson, or more specifically his Solitudes label, is one of the big names in this genre however I am a little curious on how to document who the actual artist is.

Many places will list Dan as being the primary artist for a release, however this is not exactly accurate in the sense that for most releases Dan’s contributions are his field recordings (i.e. the nature sound bits) and not the main musical composure or performance; which is often performed by someone like John Heberman.

An example of this would be:

As you can see both the original CD and the later digital re-issue both primarily credit Dan as being the artist, however all the music on this release is performed by John.

So far I have added John’s contributions as a recording-level credit - either as Performer or Instrument (if one is specified); but I’m not sure if John should actually also be marked as the recording artist?

To slightly confuse matters, there are releases by Dan Gibson which feature only his nature recordings; so for these releases he would probably still be marked as the primary artist.

An example of that:

Let me know if it’s a good idea to change the recording entity artist to John where he is the main performer of the music, or if we continue to leave the artist credit as Dan Gibson

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Dan Gibson as the release artist seems fine to me. Honestly, since there’s no actual track credits, Gibson as the track/recording artist also seems fine to me, with Herberman linked, as you already did, as a performer and composer. Credits are mostly meant to represent just that, the credit, and Gibson is the prominently credited name, it would seem.

Are there tracks that are 100% music with no sound recordings at all?

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Not that I have encountered yet. The only variants I have encountered are:

Composed music with nature sound recordings
Nature sound recordings without music

However the catalog is rather vast, so I’m sure there will be examples where its composed music without any nature sound recordings.

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