[mb-style] Composition/Performer/Production ARs at Release or Track level? - PROPOSAL

[Lauri Watts]

On Jan 2, 2008 11:20 AM, Chris B <chris at whenironsattack.com> wrote:
> what info could prove that an AR applies to all tracks? if an artist
> is given composer credits on a whole release, it's fairly certain they
> wrote all the tracks, as that credit has legal implications. however,
> any other release-wide credit may be fuzzy or it may not :)

A lot of albums do specifically say "all tracks produced by".  A lot
more say "Tracks 1,3,9,11 and 14...", or in one case I can think of
'all tracks except track 1 produced by..'.  Just because a lot of
album liners are fuzzy, doesn't mean a whole lot out there aren't very
precise, and assuming we're all only entering the fuzzy ones is a
little odd, when in fact a lot of us are putting in quite some effort
to do it the other way around, and always have been.

I don't enter assumptions, without evidence.  Take the Delerium albums
I'm working on intermittently: The liners are very precise, and
detailed, down to who recorded the vocals for each track, where, and
sometimes the dates.  Heck, one of them even has per track photography
credits. But they don't actually state that the instrumental recording
on all the tracks was done by Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber themselves;
While it's a perfectly reasonable assumption to make, it doesn't say
it anywhere, not on their site, or the liners.  Which results in those
albums having 10 or 11 'additional recording' AR's, and no actual
'recorded' one.

Which is fine by me, because it's a heck of a lot easier to add
further information if it turns up, than it ever is to remove bad
assumptions.

For me, this is obvious, for an objective database of _data_ not
guesses, we should be more specific in the rules, not relaxing them to
allow fuzziness.  We should be saying outright that "Release level
production, instrumental and vocal AR's should only be entered if they
do in fact apply to every track on the release." Not opening up and
tacitly encouraging sloppy data entry, just because it's hard to do it
right.

-- 
Lauri Watts