First, I'd like to say that I agree 100% with Barry's comments about why there are good reasons for filing soundtracks for musical theater/films under the composer.
Second, I think that there is consensus on the list that 1. The "artist" for instrumental scores (for films) should be the composer 2. The "artist" for classical music used on soundtracks should be the composer 3. The "artist" for popular music used on soundtracks should be the performer 4. The issues for games / rips are confusing and need to be pulled out into separate guidelines The contentious area is (as always) soundtracks for musical theater/film - where the characters in the work actually perform the musical pieces in the work (making it a bit like opera in that regard). I'd also like to ask artysmokes to tone down the snarkiness a bit: artysmokes wrote: > > Here's a nice quiz. Which artist is associated with "The Sound of Music"? > Who performed "My Favourite Things" and "Maria"? That's right! Richard > Rogers! > Er... > ... > Stupid Guidelines: http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/SoundtrackStyle and > http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/SoundtrackTitleStyle > -- > Cheers, Friend of Dorothy > The soundtrack guidelines may be a mess, but there are valid reasons (for musical theater/film releases) why we've chosen the "composer as primary artist" approach. Unfortunately, new editors come in, don't know all the history, and find the guidelines to be "stupid" without any attempt to understand what the trade-offs are (and how they have changed as MBz has gotten new features such as release artists for VA albums and ARs). Barry Platt wrote: > > To my mind we shouldn't be shoehorning facts into our view of what the > Artist is for a given release. While it may be convenient for some > purposes, attributing "Sixteen going on Seventeen" to Andrews and Plummer > is simply wrong. If we do the assignments at track level, then we have to > work out who contributes to each track (considerable research) and we'll > end up with an unmanageable set of pseudo-ARs to represent all > combinations, as you note. > By pseudo-ARs are you referring to "collaboration" artists which are used for just a few tracks on one or two releases? This is indeed one of the reasons track-level performer artists really are unworkable. Barry Platt wrote: > > I'm definitely of the view that composer works here, and that ARs should > be representing the more specific performance roles on a track-by-track > basis where the information is available. The release annotation can be > used to provide details of the specific version of a release. No offence, > but if someone wants to see performers in their artist tags, can they not > setup PicardQt to set the Artist field equal to the Performer field? > > Try > http://musicbrainz.org/release/e730042f-b50f-4d48-979a-ada82efb9a11.html > for an example where the composer is attributed as Artist, but > performances are included as ARs. It isn't perfect, but it is somewhat > closer to what I'm describing - there's a little data missing but as far > as I can see nothing there is *wrong*. > This is a good example of how by using performance ARs directly (rather than track- or release-level "artists") there is no need to create collaboration artists for each of the permutations of performers. I would almost wonder if it might make sense to credit a collaboration of Joss Whedon and Christophe Beck as the release artist (rather than VA), but as I think they worked on completely different parts (songs: Whedon, score: Beck) it isn't really a collaboration. There are a number of other undesirable things that the composer-as-artist approach helps to eliminate: * "Original Cast" artists. A few years ago there were hundreds of releases credited to bogus performers like "Cast" "Original London Cast" "Motion Picture Cast" etc. - of course no two releases listed under "Original Cast" actually had the same performers, as they were for unrelated musical theater/films. Do an artist search for Cast and you'll still find a few. * VA albums. Various Artist albums are the scruffy backyard of MBz - edits to them are generally less well reviewed and in general it's better if we can minimize them as much as possible. Since the performers on each track will be different, using performers leaves you with a VA release, but using the composer doesn't. Now that we can have a release artist for a VA album (a new feature from 2005), they get handled a bit better, but it's still better to avoid them if reasonably possible. * Fictional character credits. Especially for animated series, the actual performers (humans) who sing the songs are less well known and the performer credit goes to the character (i.e. "Dorothy" or "Maria" rather than Garland or Andrews). There are some cases where there is a meaningful fictional artist (maybe South Park characters) but this is generally not what we want. Having composer-as-artist as the guideline helps to prevent this. While I'm on the historical thing, I'll note that originally the artist was typically a collaboration artist for the composer + lyricist (e.g. Rogers & Hart). However, a few years ago, a whole bunch of editors coming to MBx from Last.fm came through and edited all these collaborations away, saying "soundtrack style is like classical, credit composer only." (I don't even remember any or much discussion on the -style list, it was just a wave of edits and futile to resist.) Since then, collaboration artists have proliferated throughout the database (as a result of the elimination of SG#5) and I really don't see any reason why they shouldn't be used, especially for cases like Rogers & Hart where the partnership was arguably as well or better known than either one of the performers individually. But I'm not going to go and re-attribute all those scores myself, I'm resigned to composer-as-artist (I would support a change if somebody else wants to make the RFC/RFV/editing effort). Now there is one thing that I do agree with artysmokes about, which is that the elimination of all performance ExtraTitleInformation is a bad thing. Just as classical guidelines allow (maybe even encourage?) featured artist credits as ExtraTitleInformation (e.g. "Ninth Symphony (New York Philharmonic feat. conductor: Leonard Bernstein)" I think that including cast/version ExtraTitleInformation for musical theater/film soundtracks (e.g. "Carousel (Original Broadway Cast)") is a good thing, and provides crucial performance information in a way that doesn't require the creation of bogus or myriad collaboration artists. I don't remember any discussion where it was agreed that either of these kinds of ExtraTitleInformation should be eliminated (but perhaps I missed it or have forgotten). @alex -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/The-Hills-are-Alive-with...-%28The-Great-Soundtrack-Debate%29-tf4479014s2885.html#a12783669 Sent from the Musicbrainz - Style mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Musicbrainz-style mailing list Musicbrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
