What is the difference between a band and a group?
I could see adding a collaboration and a project type, but anything
else starts getting too complicated.
Would anyone venture to write a one paragraph definition for each of
these proposed types?
Here's a stab at "collaboration" - I don't distinguish between "group" and "band",
unless you mean "group" in the current MusicBrainz sense of "more than 1 body".
There's rather more than a paragraph here, but the first paragraph stands as a
possible definition.
A collaboration is an "artist" XYZ, who would only have artists related
to it
with the assocation "Artist collaborated with XYZ". An artist of the Collaboration type must include all collaborating artists in its name -
otherwise it's probably not a Collaboration in the strict sense of just
connecting different artists. (That may be a clue that you're dealing with a
Group rather than a Collaboration). Similarly, two artists marked as
collaborations are ineligible to collaborate with each other, as only
"primitive" artists types should be in a collaboration relationship.
Edge cases: Humans will have to do what humans do best, and make sense
of boundary cases. "Simon & Garfunkel" could be classified as a collaboration
in the above definition, since it contains the names (albeit abbreviated)
of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. The second point of the defintion provides
a clue - if "Simon & Garfunkel" is ever to be treated atomically, as a
single unti, then it would be better suited to calling them a "Group",
as I would recommend. The majority of Collaborations are easier to
handle than this.
Clarifications: There are no "members" of a Collaboration "artist", nor does it
correspond to an individual person.
Advantages to having "collaboration" as a type:
1) It simplifies a common question on how to group these.
2) It expresses a more complicated implicit relationship:
In the current db, for example, we have:
Stéphane Grappelli:
• collaborated on Oscar Peterson & Stéphane Grappelli, Stéphane Grappelli & Jean-Luc Ponty and Stéphane Grappelli and Earl Hines
By introducing the Collaboration type, that information could be expressed as:
Stéphane Grappelli:
• collaborated with Oscar Peterson, Jean-Luc Ponty and Earl Hines
I'm not suggesting the website be updated to show data in the "improved" format,
just pointing out that applications using the MusicBrainz database could take
advantage of the more formal relationship.
with the assocation "Artist collaborated with XYZ". An artist of the Collaboration type must include all collaborating artists in its name -
otherwise it's probably not a Collaboration in the strict sense of just
connecting different artists. (That may be a clue that you're dealing with a
Group rather than a Collaboration). Similarly, two artists marked as
collaborations are ineligible to collaborate with each other, as only
"primitive" artists types should be in a collaboration relationship.
Edge cases: Humans will have to do what humans do best, and make sense
of boundary cases. "Simon & Garfunkel" could be classified as a collaboration
in the above definition, since it contains the names (albeit abbreviated)
of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. The second point of the defintion provides
a clue - if "Simon & Garfunkel" is ever to be treated atomically, as a
single unti, then it would be better suited to calling them a "Group",
as I would recommend. The majority of Collaborations are easier to
handle than this.
Clarifications: There are no "members" of a Collaboration "artist", nor does it
correspond to an individual person.
Advantages to having "collaboration" as a type:
1) It simplifies a common question on how to group these.
2) It expresses a more complicated implicit relationship:
In the current db, for example, we have:
Stéphane Grappelli:
• collaborated on Oscar Peterson & Stéphane Grappelli, Stéphane Grappelli & Jean-Luc Ponty and Stéphane Grappelli and Earl Hines
By introducing the Collaboration type, that information could be expressed as:
Stéphane Grappelli:
• collaborated with Oscar Peterson, Jean-Luc Ponty and Earl Hines
I'm not suggesting the website be updated to show data in the "improved" format,
just pointing out that applications using the MusicBrainz database could take
advantage of the more formal relationship.
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