Special purpose artist

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Comments

What happened to the [traditional] artist? Why it is not listed in the article? --Pabouk 02:57, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

[traditional] was eliminated, per the RFC which cleaned up the SPAs. BrianFreud 04:13, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Archived Comments

Note: This page was rewritten and replaced with a new guideline in mid-February of 2010. Comments below were made with regard to the original guideline.

http://www.musicbrainz.org/showmod.html?modid=2463580 http://www.musicbrainz.org/showmod.html?modid=2472728

I think it is counterproductive that artist for anonymous is [anon.] but artist for trad. is [traditional] they should be the same. either both the abbreviated or both the full word.

Someone mentioned something about that on the mailing list, but I do not recall who ~mo

I thought there was something from TarragonAllen saying it should be expanded (à la Volume) and I tend to agree, preferring [anonymous] to [anon.] for this. @alex

Where should 'artists' like Nintendo and Microsoft go? --Zout

In some cases, there are audio tracks for games that are "production music" and there's no proper composer other than "the employees of the game division of XXX Co." In those cases, having Nintendo or Microsoft as the artist is probably as correct as we can possibly get. It's worth noting in an ArtistAnnotation that many games do in fact have a credited composer or music engineer who should be the artist. @alex
- I'd like to comment that Nintendo, much like 'soundtrack' is a placement artist type thing for Nintendo game-soundtracks, as Nintendo has yet to make computer games, are all discs under Nintendo, music CD's. Have moved Zelda ones to Koji Kondo for example. to be confusing one Age of Empires disc under 'Microsoft' is not a game CD but an actual soundtrack. IMHO this sould not be under 'Data CD'. so in lieu of all this I have thought to go look over my game CD's to see if there is any music-composing info in the credits.. ~mo
  - Although I disagree with dupuy, a good example is Bungie here, as that track is just a silly bit of audio of some guy saying "I've got a bad feeling about this" at different speeds. I think [no artist] is more correct. Maybe, though, in this instance it would be possible to find out who did the voice acting for that clip and credit them. Maybe it would be better to credit someone from the sound departmant of the game? At least it's a human rather that a company. ~[[[User:SenRepus|SenRepus]]]

I think we could build another special Artist, altough I'm generally against this kind of complication. I'm talking about Gregorian music that is quite particular. Strictly following rules it has to be [anon.] because no one knows who wrote it, but it is in fact the born of all occidental music and probably deserves an exception. Moreover it's a very limited and unique type of music that is always grouped together in phisical and online stores. Now on MB we have a lot of release spread under bogus Artist and I wish we could fix it. --ClutchEr2

I'd say to go for it; we, the users build the database. Just add a clear annotation describing what the artist is for... --azertus
- (noting that I didn't quite understand you wanted to create new artist [Gregorian] or similar, an idea I am not *that* much against, really) but then comes the other task. of deciding when something is Gregorian or when something is 'anon' ? ~mo
- You might want to clean up Gregorian Chants... --Zout

As you can see, some of these SpecialPurposeArtist are in brackets [] and lowercase, that is a good way to quick identify them. I think they all have to be this way; also because there could be easly be a proper Artist named, for example, "Sound of Nature". --ClutchEr2

The artists in brackets really represent artists; the other ones, like Disney and Sounds of Nature, are merely places for badly entered releases to reside. Ideally, they should not exist. This is not the case for [anon.] and such. --Zout

Maybe someone should explain those artists here. E.g. what's the difference between [unkown] and [anon.]? --Fuchs

Regarding Hollywood Edge: Judging from the apparently official webpage http://soundfx.com/HollywoodEdge.htm, I think the name should be written "The Hollywood Edge" (including the definite article, just like The Beatles). I don't fully understand if this is the name of a "group", a publisher (seems to be published by SoundFX.com, though) or a product (a series of releases). Probably the latter. Since MusicBrainz doesn't seem to have a way to group and name a series of releases, I think it would be appropriate to keep this as an artist. --LA2, April 21, 2006