Hi all - This was discussed recently but unfortunately that discussion tailed off fairly quickly without any consensus being reached.
My feeling is that there is a need for some sort of style guideline for how to deal with the myriad different types of releases one might find in the soundtrack section of a music store - the benchmark I use for what an uninitiated observer might reasonably consider a "soundtrack". Some of these MB will consider soundtracks, others we wouldn't - I posted some examples in the earlier discussion. Defining exactly what we consider to be a soundtrack is essential in my opinion as it isn't necessarily obvious to everybody, including myself. There are releases in MB that to me should be soundtracks, no question, and others that shouldn't. The second point is that there are cases where it is appropriate to use a classical attribution style - notably on film scores - and others where it would make more sense to attribute using the performer as we do in most other cases. The problem seems to lie in defining where classical and non-classical style should apply. A simple guideline of Score=classical and anything else attributes the performer seems overly simplistic to me. Using your example of The Sound of Music, while you're right that Julie Andrews is the main performer, there are tracks with other contributors. Does Julie Andrews even perform on "How do you Solve a Problem like Maria?" (a song *about* her character rather than *by* her), for example? Crediting Julie Andrews as artist on the entire release is at best partially wrong. Other musicals don't even have a single primary performer, so should we make pseudo artists representing the entire main cast? While I take your point that it is perhaps more of interest to an end user to identify with the performer, how different is this to the discussion surrounding ClassicalStyle? At least for ensemble performances where artist attributions could easily vary from track to track (Artist A/Artist B on one track, Artist A/Artist C on another, and Artist A/Artist B/Artist C on a third), the composer(s) would appear to make more sense, and ARs are there to represent performances in a more meaningful way than multiple pseudo-artists. I note http://musicbrainz.org/release/031159eb-ebed-4dd0-a1fb-71902ad2de8c.html doesn't have any ARs to attribute performers, or an annotation to the release indicating that it is the motion picture version of the soundtrack starring Julie Andrews. Both are allowed and should be there, but either would address the problem you raised in the annotation. I'm not disagreeing that Soundtrack and SoundtrackTitle styles are a mess and need reworking. Indeed I'd even be willing to have a stab a doing so myself if we could form at least a basic consensus on these points. Regards, Barry _______________________________________________ Musicbrainz-style mailing list Musicbrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
