I’m trying to catalog an artist who used to make My Little Pony fanmusic (don’t judge me), but has now moved in a more general direction and apparently tried to whitewash with a lot of their old material. I’ve since discovered they have two entries here.
TheDashDub: http://musicbrainz.org/artist/42d7ded4-10b1-488b-9752-8a48d22b73ff
Christopher Heron: http://musicbrainz.org/artist/c7ac4803-b464-4dcb-8a50-11d915cc1e1b
Part of the issue is that the artist has gone back and “revamped” their old releases on BandCamp, so (some) albums previously credited as “TheDashDub” are now credited to “Chris Heron” (although they missed a couple album and track credits). Additionally, many track names have been altered to remove MLP character references. For example, the track “Applejack’s Daydream” is now just “Daydream” on BandCamp (although the original title is still extant on YouTube). Album art has also been purged in many instances.
What’s proper procedure here? It’s not entirely clear exactly when this transition happened. Should two separate artist entries be maintained or should they be merged? Should old releases be credited to the original name or the updated name? It seems it’s going to take a lot of work to untangle this, and I want to know which direction I should move before I start.
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We should keep the little poney releases and add the new releases. They have different names but according to what you say you can use the same recordings, no need to rename those. Only the tracks will have the new names.
Same for track and release artists. The new artist name will just be on release and tracks, no change for the existing.
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My sense of best practice is:
- document what was true previously
- document what is true now
- use shared
recordings, shared works, and relationships to show the links between 1 and 2
- use
annotations to explain anything that is still unclear after step 3
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So just to clarify since I’m still kind of new at this: Should I merge the artist entries? Then old releases will have two versions, one with the original credit, one with the new credit?
OR
Should two artist entries be kept, add all the old stuff to TheDashDub, then add all the new and retroactively-updated stuff to Chris Heron? Or just the new stuff?
Should two artist entries be kept, add all the old stuff to TheDashDub, then add all the new and retroactively-updated stuff to Chris Heron?
This is what I’d do.
From a more abstract viewpoint, a person decided to mostly scrap a persona (I.e. an MB Artist) and create a new one re-using old recordings, right?
I’m not a fan of deleting valid data and I don’t think anyone around here really is. Also merging the artists just doesn’t seem to represent artist intent, so I wouldn’t go with your first plan.
For most intents and purposes, there have been multiple releases (e.g. “Applejack’s Daydream” and “Daydream”) by different artists, using (mostly) the same tracks (Recordings). Unfortunately they use the same BandCamp page, so some links might have to be removed for “TheDashDub” releases.
This is basically what @jesus2099 and @CallerNo6 have also said, I was just trying to explain the reasoning for this.
No matter what the artist did, “TheDashDub” released a bunch of music at some point and that data still stands, “Chris Heron” now created new releases and they should be added as well. To prevent duplication and confusion, re-using recordings and making use of Works and annotations would make sense.
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Okay, that makes sense. Thank you! I’ll get working on straightening this out.
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One thing to note is that this was probably actually prompted by Hasbro’s lawyers getting in contact with the artist. They don’t generally have an issue with pony fanart/music/etc. - but as soon as you start selling anything, they will ask you to remove references to their trademarks, characters, etc. This could explain the track renames and album art removal on the bandcamp releases.
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