On 5/25/06, Nikki <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think, really, that both of you are right. There's no way to draw a
definite line between A & B and A feat. B and from the evidence given, I'd
say this one falls in the grey area between the two.
It's not the existance of a grey area that's the problem. It's the
fact that if you fall on one side of an arbitrarily drawn line within
this grey area then you're a 'collaboration' and if you fall on the
other you're a 'feat.' and that depending on what side of the line you
fall on, the database stores the information in totally different
ways. I'd suggest moving the line far to one side in the interests of
consistency.
One basic fact is key to this and hopefully everyone can agree once
it's been pointed out:
* there is no basis or rationale for continuing to normalise track
titles to include (feat. X)
Go dig out your albums and you'll find that very few actually use that
format. They might say 'with' or 'duet with' or 'vocals by' or 'ft.'
You'll notice as well that as many times the feat or whatever appears
attached to the artist as it does to the song (particularly on VA
compilations and singles).
The only valid reason to do this was to allow a script to extract this
information at a later date and store it in the database. This has
already happened. I believe that script has actually been written and
run. We now have ARs, which not only allow you to store such info, it
lets you do so with incredibly fine grained detail. (An unvalid reason
might be to make your record collection titles 'neater')
We also have the changes brought in as a response to SG5 which allow
"X feat. Y" (or "X vs. Y" or "X meets the Ys uptown" or anything else)
to be the artist on the single, VA compilations or soundtracks as well
as the greatest hits albums of *both* collaborating artists without
the side effect of changing the single artist albums to be a VA album.
This also means track entries by crazy one-hit wonder dance artists
called "X feat. Y" no longer need to be mutilated to fit in with a now
redundant rule, that actually tried to solve a different problem in
the first place.
All the above means we have enough information stored in the database
now to take "track title" by "X vs. Y" appearing on X's greatest hits
album and transform it, at time of tagging, to "track title (feat. Y)"
by "X". Or even "track title (feat. A, B and C)". Not only that you
could use "ft." or anything else the user wanted to specify. Anyone
who wants their albums tagged like that can have it, it's just a
simple matter of programming.
So I would suggest alway putting the info in the artist field unless
it is incredibly minor ("trumpet solo by X", "featuring the St. Paul's
Choir") in which case just leave it as it is written on the cover and
mark it with an appropriate AR.
With reference to Aretha and Eurythmics, if it is really felt that the
contribution of Aretha to this song is not enough for her to be
awarded the full MusicBrainz ampersand then "Eurythmics with Aretha
Franklin" seems just as good a name for a collaboration to me.
This will of course lead to the creation of many of the dreaded "bogus
artists", the prevention of which sometimes seems like our prime
directive, the 0th Law of MusicBrainz. Seems worth it to have useful,
consistent and correct data, to me at least.
cheers,
dave
_______________________________________________
Musicbrainz-style mailing list
Musicbrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org
http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
