Two counterpoints here. First, the “N-tet” is in many cases more a matter of counting than of artistic intent. The difference between the Joe Bloggs Quartet and the Joe Bloggs Quintet is often no more than the fact that one more musician got hired for a particular session.
Second, and somewhat related, is that how a record got billed has (at least historically) had more to do with the record company than the artist themselves. Take the Monk example I gave above - I guarantee you it was not Monk’s decision to release one album as a quartet and the other under only his name.
That “complete” view could certainly be useful as well. But in jazz circles you will generally see a distinction between albums recorded “as a leader” - usually under their own name or as an eponymous group - as opposed to ones where they appear “as a sideman”.
As I understand it, the OP wants to delete any MBID for the quintets and replace them with the artist in the title of the quintet. Only using an Alias to link the quintet. This will make it much harder to locate those tracks of the quintet.
I still think this is wrong as it makes more sense for the applications to do the linking. In one of the example edits linked a KODI thread where someone wanted to put Roger Waters and Pink Floyd together. This makes sense to someone with only a few releases by those artists, but not to someone like me with hundreds of releases in those two names.
The ticket better allows the separate entities to exist alongside the ability to combine them.
(And I agree that Miles Davies All Stars is a lousy example as they are marketing things, but there are still members of some of those groups that would benefit from the ticket idea but not from flat merging everything with Miles Davies name in the title.)
@yindesu: let’s be honest and not compare regular bands and eponymous ones. Of course an album by the Miles Davis Quartet is part of Miles Davis’ discography. But a Led Zeppelin album should not appear on Robert Plant’s page for example.
[Highstrung’s message sums it up better]
@highstrung: I have to admit that this is a really strong argument against the merging.
Then, how about the midway solution where we have the two artists on the release and the RG with special aliases?
@IvanDobsky: if an alias works on an album, why couldn’t it work on a track?
Of course, if you think that the alias doesn’t work on the album neither, yeah my solution falls apart then haha
I understand your arguments and I get it that it would be really complicated to change such a massive guideline in one thread.
That’s why I’m going to insist on the second option that could allow both sides to coexist. With the two artists on the releases/RGs only, every album would appear on Miles Davis’ page, but Miles Davis Quintet would continue to exist and to centralize the works credited under this name. Recordings and relationships would not be affected.
I like the idea behind the “dual artist” approach, and to my thinking as a jazz fan, it would produce the result I am looking for. My biggest concern there would be the amount of work needed to convert existing releases/RGs, and the difficulty of getting editors to follow what sounds like a pretty non-intuitive practice.
The first thing I learned as a database manager was “Don’t think about the work to come and focus on the improvement” hahaha
If we include this rule in the guidelines and make sure that everyone here is on the same page, the word could spread fast. The issue would be resolved progressively but at least we will have a solution.
If the issue is just navigation, wouldn’t just adding something like this to the filter on artist pages be a hundred times better?
Showing official release groups by this artist:
Show release groups including eponymous groups
Show all release groups
Show all release groups including eponymous groups
Show official various artist release groups
Show all various artist release groups
I don’t think messing with artist credits should be necessary. As long as the artist entries have accurate relationships, it’s completely possible to use those.
Like @highstrung pointed it out, it may sound as just navigation for MB but I think it would benefit both MB and linked databases.
I believe (and the numerous feedbacks we receive seem to point that this is a general feeling) that it would be clearer to include all eponymous bands by default. Of course the ticket is interesting but once again, I feel like it’s more hiding the issue than fixing it.
I fear you may overestimate how thoroughly most editors read the guidelines, and underestimate how many contributors just want something that makes their tags look approximately correct.
I think the distribution of the likes in this thread are interesting. There are only seven people talking, and no one official. The posts to pick up the largest numbers of likes are about keeping the MBIDs separate as they are now and changing the way they are displayed by adding more filtering options to the display.
@Mapache_Del_Raton I personally think you are better off changing your Sans Critique website to create the merged display that you require and not remove distinctions on the MB database that some people seem to prefer.
If you use the entire MB database dumps, you also have the relationships between artists and bands. If it can be implemented here, it can be implemented anywhere else. If you want to group artists on your third-party website, you have the artist is an eponymous member of links in the database dumps. I don’t see what this change will do except mess with perfectly fine and consistent data.
To me, merging the second into the first is a no-brainer. There’s multiple duplications (“Strings Aflame” and “Other Worlds, Other Sounds” are in both), no rhyme or reason even strictly taking cover-as-intent (“Infinity in Sound” is credited to the orchestra, “Las Tandas” to him individually), and as far as I can tell, no relationships in the Orchestra entry that would be screwed up.
The orchestra is a group. Whether or not a release is consistently credited to it is irrelevant. If there’s multiple release groups on both pages, you can merge them.
The orchestra has several credits on recordings as an orchestra. If you merge this, a person will be credited as a performing orchestra.
I’m still not getting how this leads to him being credited as an Orchestra on individual recording entries, though. The credits in the Recordings tab are all under “Artist,” so if they were merged, wouldn’t it just substitute the artist credit as “Juan Garcia Esquivel” instead of “Esquivel and His Orchestra?” Which is already the case for the bulk of his recordings (the “Juan Garcia” Recordings tab has four pages of results, the “His Orchestra” recording tab just one, with tons of overlaps of course due to the above-listed inconsistencies)
One entity refers to a person, the other to a group of musicians. Even if it’s a group of rotating studio musicians, it’s a named group credited on releases, and should be kept as a separate entity.
If this is confusing, there’s alternatives here suggested that would present the data in a more agreeable discography view, without having to merge groups with an artist.
