[mb-style] RFC: Works lists (and other related changes then implied)

[Brian Schweitzer]

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 11:38 PM, David K. Gasaway <dave at gasaway.org> wrote:
> On 5 Mar 2008 at 17:07, Brian Schweitzer wrote:
>
>  > This would mean covers linking from sessions back to the originating
>  > artist - but not the inclusion of every cover within the works list of
>  > the covering band.  As we can't actually make that link yet - lacking
>  > session entities - I would think it makes more sense to still link from
>  > the instance (and eventually the track masters) back to the originating
>  > band's work list.  That way, when we do eventually have sessions, we're
>  > only modifying the AR to add in the session, rather than having to
>  > actually relocate all the ARs for the cover work.
>
>  NGS stuff aside, the point I was making was that if you don't want to
>  have covers in the work lists, then you have to either:
>  1) Link all covers back to the original composition (losing any cover-
>  to-cover provenance in the process).
>  2) Allow track-to-track cover ARs.

I think what I described before, with or without NGS, would fall under
what you describe as option 1.  But why does this lose "cover-to-cover
provenance"?  Actually, I'm not sure I know quite what that means.  A
cover of a work is linked back to the originating artist's work.  But
what I think you're talking about I also addressed:

"Now, so I'm not misunderstood, if we're dealing with a song like, say,
In the Pines / Where Did You Sleep Last Night, where the song has
evolved with every other artist who has recorded it, then yes, that
quite likely ought to appear in many works lists, each of the two
branches of development of that song linking together back through
time."

If you're talking about "cover-to-cover provenance", and intending
situations where a track 'mutates' from one cover to the next, so that
artist #3 is covering artist #2's version, not the original artist #1
version - isn't that exactly the In the Pines situation?  I can think
of other similar situations involving translated lyrics, for example,
but In the Pines perhaps has the most extreme 'mutation' history like
this.

Otherwise, if artist #3 and artist #2 are both playing the artist #1
version, there is no chain - and even with track-track, we still do
now link those back to the originating artist, not artist #2.

Brian