Merging Puff Daddy and P. Diddy?

Hi!

I was wondering if there’s any good reason to keep Puff Daddy and P. Diddy as separate artists, rather than different credits of the same artist. Wikipedia makes no difference and lists “Other names: Diddy, P. Diddy, Puff Daddy, Puffy, Puff”, but I’m not familiar enough with the reasons for the change and if it’s really considered a different musical project to enter a merge without asking around first :slight_smile:

3 Likes

The name change from Puff Daddy to P. Diddy wasn’t for a new project but just to start “fresh” and leave the past behind him (after he was found not guilty of charges of possession of a weapon in connection with a 1999 shooting at a New York club…)

source: BBC News | MUSIC | Puffy becomes P Diddy

and then he switched to Diddy to avoid confusion on how to call him.

“Nobody knew what to call me. I’d notice that people were uncomfortable when I’d meet them for the first time, and then they’d ask me what they should call me,” he said.

“I even started to get confused myself - and when I’d called someone on the telephone it took me a long time to explain who I was. Too long.”

He added: “One word. Five letters. Period.”

source: Drop the P, to the D, and just call him Diddy

I say merge. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Thanks!

Entered the edits:
Merge
Name edit

Does it make sense to also merge “Sean Combs” into Diddy as per the legal names clause in https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Artist ?

I would prefer if you don’t merge peoples legal names with thair stage names.
I like to keep both as it makes it much easier to credit them as writers on works if they are a different entity.
For thair own works it does not make much of a difference but when someone writes a song for someone else it is a lot easier to have another entry in the database than working out that Sean Combs is Diddy and then needing to change the artist credited back to Sean Combs.

The problem with that is sometimes the performer name is credited and sometimes the legal name, so you would end up with credits spread over two different artists.

I think MusicBrainz’ interface could be a lot better at exposing artist aliases (and lots of other information). If you want to add a credit for Sean Combs, Diddy does show up in the search, but without any information like a “legal name: Sean Combs” comment. And that makes it very confusing for editors who don’t know that Diddy and Sean Combs are the same person. And it would be nice if the search term you used is pre-filled in the credited as text box when you select an artist from the list, so you don’t have to change the artist credit back.

Likewise it would be nice if those search windows would be able to automatically show information on an entity based on relationships, like producer if that’s the artists most used credit, or member of if they have such a relationship.

But lack of developers means that we’ll have to live with the current situation for a while.

5 Likes

FWIW, I would merge them.

(Edit: Also, I just had some fun with Diddy’s aliases:innocent:)

2 Likes

I’ll give it a go: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/42756955

2 Likes