History:Featuring Artist Style

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Style for Featuring Artists

Alert.png 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,

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

If no artist can be considered secondary,

  • "Artist 1 & Artist 2"

and file the track/release under that artist, and

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 releases and VariousArtist releases on the release 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 ReleaseArtist is the main artist a release is credited to. This means, the artist mentioned on the release cover (in most cases the front cover), package or any other labeled package like entity that describes the release (e.g. release page for online releases).
  • A collaboration should only be created for primary artists who contributed equally to the track/release.
  • 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 release 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 more than two: "... (feat. Foo, Bar, Baz ... & Quux)".

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

It seems that current practice is to use one feat./collab format for all instances of a track. why can't we have feat. when it appears, and X & Y when it appears? why the need to use one method for every instance of the track? OF COURSE a collaborative artist is likely to appear as a guest on an album of the other artist, but not a guest if that same track appeared on their own album. OF COURSE if a guest collaboration is released as a standalone single, the 2 artists are likely to be billed equally.

Seemingly, whatever format the track was released as first (be it y feat. x, or X & Y) is the one that filters through to every instance of that track. It's absolutely infuriating, especially as this format is generally completely unrelated to the actual contribution of each artist, and purely based on the format of initial release (X's album / Y's album / X & Ys single) - eg, i don't think anyone could argue that Eurythmics/Franklin was a 50/50 collaboration (Eurythmics did all music, wrote the song, Franklin just did guest vocals).

With that said, I really don't think it's our place to decide whether a collaboration was 'equal' or not. Besides, if we did that, we'd just end up having releases as "X & Y" as feat., which was contrary to the sleeve (confusing our users), and vice versa. Can't we just use the format that's on the sleeve of the release in question? --Gecks