History:Featuring Artist Style

Style for Featuring Artists

Attention! This guideline has been changed since the implementation of SG5DisasterRelief in 2006-01. See HistoryOfFeaturingArtistStyle for details.

Official Guideline

This guideline applies to cases in which one or more artists collaborate on a track or release.

If one artist can be considered the primary artist,

• file the track/release under the primary artist, and
• add AdvancedRelationships of the PerformanceRelationshipClass to link to the secondary artists, and
• append the name of the secondary artists to the TrackTitle/AlbumTitle as follows:

• "Put Your Lights On (feat. Everlast)"

If no artist can be considered secondary,

• CreateANewArtist in the form:

• "Artist 1 & Artist 2"

and file the track/release under that artist, and

• add AdvancedRelationships of the CollaborationRelationshipType to the new artist.

This is an OfficialStyleGuideline

Rationale

Currently there is no way to efficiently assign two artists to a track or release. In order to keep the database consistent and to keep albums and VariousArtist releases on the album listing of the main artist, additional FeaturingArtists are added to the TrackTitle.

We know that this is ugly, but there really is no good alternative. Read through the HistoryOfFeaturingArtistStyle and the referenced discussions carefully before complaining.

To alleviate the ugliness of this guideline a bit, SG5DisasterRelief has been implemented. Now artists who collaborated equally to a track or release can be entered into the database as a CollaborationArtist and assigned to single tracks without turning releases into VariousArtist releases. The second part of the guideline deals with this case.

Details and Discussion

• The AlbumArtist is the main artist an album release is credited to. This means, the artist mentioned on the album cover (in most cases the front cover), package or any other labeled package like entity that describes the album (e.g. album page for online releases).
• A collaboration should only be created for primary artists who contributed equally to the track/album.
• Do not add any secondary artist to the track title. Secondary artists can be additional voice performers or instrumentalists. Those are often mentioned on the cover of the album the track appears on. Artists that didn't musically perform for this track don't fit in this category.
• For additional contributors who didn't perform on the track, use the various AdvancedRelationships to define their roles in relation to the track. Those can be contributors to the technical production process (mixers, producers, record engineers, etc.), remixers and others. The different roles are explained in CompilationRelationshipClass, CompositionRelationshipClass, ProductionRelationshipClass, RemixRelationshipClass. Note, that composers are often the main artists of classical releases (see ClassicalStyleGuide) and remixers or compilers can also be main artists if they fit into 1.
• If a track features both "Foo" and "Bar", it should be entered as "... (feat. Foo & Bar)". For three: "... (feat. Foo, Bar & Baz )". For more accordingly.

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One last question: is the & in the collaboration artist a must or an example? I see artists added with & like Queen & David Bowie and and like Queen and Elton John? This should be mentioned in the notes either way. 

• An example. And we should also mention that an existing collaboration artist like 'A and B' should be picked, even if the sleeve says 'A & B'. This to not create multiple collaboration artists that essentially are the same. --Zout

One more: If & is a must then what is the solution for more than 3 artists? Should also be mentioned in the guideline.--Fuchs

• Maybe "A, B & C" as a suggestion? --Zout

One thing completly confusing me... the section above says "Do not add any secondary artist to the track title." - hu? What do I miss here? --Shepard

• Not only is it ambigious but it's also contradictory. We need definitions to for terms as part of the styleguide (either embedded or linked from a glossary). I think if we had them, whoever wrote that would realize it didn't make much sense. -- WolfSong 13:21, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
  • That person was me, and I just collected all the stuff that was written all over the wiki. Feel free to either edit it directly (if it really makes no sense) or to work on an enhanced version just below the official one. Fuchs' mail to the StyleMailingList would be a good starting point. --DonRedman