Without the voice actors there’d be no Audio drama? 
Without the writer there would be no actors.
Notice the biggest name on the cover
Doctor Who stories have always emphasised the important of the author.
You are correct the name is big there, but that isn’t the case for many audio dramas. Some of them only have the title in the cover art.
If the author is only in the cover art, then check Wikipedia or the Dr Who Wiki. There is plenty of info on Doctor Who out therre.
I have no problem figuring out the writers of an audiobook/audio drama, it’s just that the writers aren’t always credited as the most important person. I also think they aren’t - if anything even the release shouldn’t contain the author, the related work should. But unfortunately I can’t create works because I don’t know the tracklist.
But this is why guidelines exist at MB. The idea of the guidelines is it gives people something to work from as a basis. Audio Drama was split from Audiobook and should still be following those guidelines.
You can’t just swap that to a Classical style instead.
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Maybe guidelines just need chancing because “Audio dramas” are more “Classical” than “Audiobooks” and “Audiobook” type of crediting doesn’t suit Audio dramas?
In addition to that, crediting the writer under Artists is just wrong from the database standpoint, they aren’t performing, they wrote the works that are performed - works exist as a separate thing and can be created so that the writer is in the most important spot. You make a very good point, it might be that every single Audio drama and audiobook needs redoing and new style guide to force the creation of works.
You can’t just change things because you don’t like what you see. There are already dozens of Dr Who Audio Dramas here at MB and they are well credited.
The author comes first, then the performers.
To tweak your new layout to better fit what is already the standard then just sneak the author into the start of those lists.
Personally I think it is a bit of an overkill to list every actor - that could get very messy for some productions.
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The database is built around physical releases. What you propose will destroy pages like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett and instead push their credited works over to scattered artists.
The database is not supposed to be built around a label.
These writers created the product that is being performed. In the same way that a musical artist has musicians playing parts on their album.
It will push their works under the relationship tab if it’s a Release and if it’s a actually properly entered Work then that should be displayed on the main page.
I disagree, I’ve seen not a single release that would credit even half of the voice actors under “performed by”.
And I haven’t, I just followed what was the logical way of entering the data in addition to not seeing a single ounce of consistency across the releases.
I can absolutely rewrite ~2.4 thousand releases but it’d be a waste.
Here is an example of a release based on the current guidelines
This database is used by many different people in many ways. One of these are people use use the database to lookup details about their CDs and let their media centres of tagging software update the titles.
Dropping the all important author to “works” level puts it out of sight of that large group who have been used to using it in the current way.
Releases like this have always been credited to the authors first. Same as in the book shop. The performers are secondary.
Something that works for your Doctor Who series does not work for all Audio Dramas.
All the releases currently in the database have been entered by people who have CDs in their hands. So they are following the guidelines as they were based on physical media.
The main data that comes first is track names and track credits from their CDs. Followed by titles of release and artists as credited on that physical media.
What you propose is a dramatic change to the current setup.
All plays are written by someone. Their name should appear first.
The wiki page says pseudo-releases exist as a alternate tracklist. Providing a pseudo-release would allow people to tag releases that is the entire work in a single file.
Eagerly waiting for that
Something that works for audiobooks doesn’t work for Audio dramas and podcasts?
It’s not a book though, the voice actors are who turn the written text into something we can enjoy.
It is now quite clear this hadn’t been discussed properly previously and maybe we should get this sorted out properly right now before we dig ourselves deeper into crutch of a solutions that really don’t correspond to what the database schema should correspond to.
And I thought maybe I could get to uploading podcasts
On the Work, yes, why even have Works if we aren’t using them properly?
Yes, I agree it needs to be discussed. This is why I am here and talking 
It is also why I tried to point you to the previous examples when starting on this as I am also a big audio drama fan.
The Good Omens example above is a very good example. Please stop assuming I am talking about books - I really am not. I do genuinely know the difference. Both Adams and Pratchett have huge outputs of both books and plays. BBC Drama has a huge audio only output.
Yes, I agree that works need to be used more. But remember that this database started from data from CDs and expanded. So at the core you have to also remember those users. Otherwise there would be no data.
If you look at the Douglas Adams examples some of the complexity starts to show up. A book is written once. Then gets read out loud a couple of different times. Then a play gets created of it. Which is then released more than once. And as it is released it is chopped up in different ways in different areas…
Yes, I work more at a track and recordings because I also started into MB from the CDs.
And lets please not get distracted by podcasts as that is also totally different.
At the store you will find the Terry Pratchett audio dramas all listed under P for Pratchett. They are not scattered around the store under the performers. Whatever system is created needs to honour the current system too.
Well, they’re works that might not have a writer, that are similar to an Audio drama because of the amount of people and acting, I’d say they’re similar.
That is true, but the sort order is then based on writer, not actor 
Podcasts tend to be non-fiction - i am splitting this distraction into a separate thread… keep the podcast ideas separate please as they are a very different idea. They also have clear style guides already… see broadcast
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I will create another thread soon enough.