How to credit releases from a local music school?

MusicBrainz
1

I have a few releases from a local music school that give an overview of its repertoire (mostly classical music and jazz). The recordings were done either by single students or various ensembles/orchestras/bands of the school.

  • Some of the students have become professional musicians, others have not
  • Some of the groups are quite renowned (have existed for decades, won numerous awards, have a unique name, have their own homepage, toured internationally), others have very generic names (“symphony orchestra”), and still others are basically one‐off projects with a unique name.
  • The front cover and spine have the release title and the name of the music school on it
  • The back cover lists the track titles with the composers
  • The booklet lists the recording artists

What option (if any) would you choose for the following:

Release artist:

  1. Various Artists
  2. Various Artists credited as LocalMusicSchool
  3. Add LocalMusicSchool as an artist

Generic names:

  1. Create a new artist, e.g. “Symphony orchestra of LocalMusicSchool”
  2. LocalMusicSchool credited as GenericName

One‐off projects:

  1. Create a new artist, e.g. “FancyName”
  2. LocalMusicSchool credited as FancyName

Performer relationships:

  1. Credit only the “famous” musicians
  2. Add a new artist for every performer

(In the last case, I intend to add every performer as an artist. Even if insignificant, they are now part of music history. I mean, except for the choir of 7‐year‐olds, the musicianship is probably (definitely) higher than for many “professional” artists)

What would you do?

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I’d probably name the artist as “LocalMusicSchool”. That is the “group”, and the members have changed over the years. The school is the common thread that they performed under.

I would credit most of the musicians where possible as individual performers. At the time they were part of the group and performing under the group\school name. If was Fred playing Triangle in 2005 and that is especially interesting if he went on to be part of famous band.

Even if Fred never performed again, he was still an Artist on that day.

Project names seem more like a Release title to me. Or as an alias for the school “artist”. (I’d have to see the flyers or covers)

The “one off projects” are still part of the school, and maybe are aliases. If they performed many times as a group, you do have an option to make a “sub-group” relationship.

Or if that group then went off on their own, then there are other relationships that could be of use in here:
image

If a famous group started within the school, and they split away on their own, then I’d be crediting them by name on that Release.

I would have thought classical editors can give a more structured example.

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As far as performer relationships, I think that is only limited by how much energy you want to put into it. I don’t always create an artist entry for the person credited with additional backing vocals on track 16, but I would never discourage anyone else from doing so.

I would suggest though that you add disambiguation comments to any newly created artists if their names are at all common.

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A trick worth doing on a large project like this will be is to make plenty of use of the Annotation field. Initially dropping a lot of the credit texts into there first while energy and time is found to add every individual one by one. I am one of those people who do enjoy getting into those extreme details so I understand the satisfaction in a mission like this.

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Okay, thanks a lot for the answers!

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