[mb-users] Is their an artist property for an artists

[Tracy Poff]

On 11/6/07, Brian Schweitzer <brian.brianschweitzer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I tend to think that this sort of biographical data on artists isn't
> > > appropriate for musicbrainz (in an ideal world in which we could
> > > easily get the data elsewhere), but I'm not against its inclusion. I
> > > just think that we should be more focused on the music than the
> > > artists, generally.
>
> I would disagree on two points.

<snip things that I agree with>

Well, that's everything, actually. I don't disagree with you--location
information is useful for us to disambiguate artists; that's an
editing task, though. Note that I did say "in an ideal world in which
we could easily get the data elsewhere" above. I meant this not as
'someone could go get a book and look it up' but rather as 'we could
programmatically retrieve and display this data whenever we need to'.

I think that our work should focus on data about releases--who
performed them, who wrote them, who published them and when, etc.
Biographical data about artists--even birth dates--are really
secondary to this (or should be, in my opinion). I don't dispute that
these are useful, I was just pointing out that ideally it wouldn't be
up to us to keep track of these things. We'd be able to say 'this is
the artist with SuperCoolDatabaseID #12345' and the server could
retrieve that sort of stuff automatically (and, of course,
SuperCoolDatabase could get our info from us, too).

I realize that we can't do this now, but I have no reason to believe
that we won't be able to do it one day, and possibly soon (for some
version of 'soon'), so I question whether it will be more beneficial
for us to add all this data even when it isn't needed for
disambiguation, or to add it where needed and wait for a more perfect
world. I suppose a large part of the answer to this will depend on
what theoretical percentage of artists would need disambiguation if we
had every possible artist listed--a figure that I would not presume to
guess at.

Tracy Poff