When is a Place a different Place? I understood that as long as something kept happening in the same building, it stayed as one place. Even if the owners kept rebranding it? Including when the owners changed as this is why we can set dates on ownership.
So should these be merged? They are all at 10202 West Washington Blvd
Part 2 - anyone got a script that can insert the aliases that would be needed to be added to everything so the merge would show the correct place names post merge? If these were merged, there are a few hundred places that would need an alias fixed based on date.
On a similar side note - Wembley Arena has rebranded again. For last few years it has been the “SSE Arena, Wembley”. Now SSE is owned by OVO it has changed to “OVO Arena, Wembley”.
I guess there is a ticket somewhere suggesting a more smart naming based on year. Some way to check a year to then choose the correct name for the place. It is pretty common in modern day sponsorship.
I think as long as it’s the same (set of) rooms or buildings or whatever, I don’t see much issue merging places.
they shouldn’t be merged if one of the places is a different room in a building or if a place gets demolished and rebuilt. I might argue that this should include a change of function, say a pressing plant gets converted to a venue, while keeping the old building.
I could have sworn I’d found a ticket for handling place aliases better, but Jira doesn’t work well on mobile…
I look at these and think “that’s just wrong”… but there is too much to edit before a merge can be done. 600+ aliases to add before it would be in a safe state to merge.
Some would be easy to do. Fixing Columbia and Lorimar meant editing just three albums and now their aliases would be ready to merge… but others are 300/400/600+ items per “studio”!
It is clearly all the same place. Just MGM became Columbia was bought by Sony and then The Streisand stepped in. It is all coming out of the same building. Just needs a magic script to fix the aliases… or maybe wait for a database update. If you merge two artists the aliases come in to play. Need the same feature here.
As a counterexample, I would argue that the Bradley Recording Studios should remain separate from Columbia Studio B, even though they were the same building serving the same function. Before he sold it to Columbia, Owen Bradley was not just the owner but also the house producer, so there was a fundamental change of identity with the sale.
That is quite a common situation. I could find a few examples where one famous musician converts a house to a studio, and later sells it to other famous people with different styles.
An example here: Hook End Studios - MusicBrainz Owned by many famous people (Alvin Lee, Dave Gilmour, Trevor Horn) under ever changing names (Space Studios, Outside Studios, Hook End, Sarm Hook End) producing a lot of well known albums.
I wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole. But you have fun 