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

[Chris B]

On 02/01/2008, Lauri Watts <krazykiwi at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

that's of course great :) i'm just speaking from personal experience
that a lot of albums i have in my collection have credits that are
vague, and sometimes even somewhat incorrect. most releases i see have
'produced by X' written on them, which cannot be taken as 'all
tracks', but also can't be discarded outright (IMO).

> 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.

yet again something i asked for 6 months ago comes again :) i shall bump it...

> 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.

well, i totally disagree! if i was to go through my record collection
now i would conservatively predict that over half would have
non-specific release wide credits. we're just going to ignore these?
it's of vast discographical importance, surely?