Topic: Introducing artist links/relations!

The AP database is now capable of modelling relations between artists. Previously artists were unrelated, each artists had their list of releases and that was that. Now I've introduced a few additional relations artists can have with other artists. Most notably, ownership of projects and membership of bands.

This means that going forward we can model the artists more accurately. I've already done this for some artists, as an example you can check out the Devin Townsend page:

https://awesomeprog.com/artists/6135

Previously all the DT releases were listed under one artist named "Devin Townsend". I created new artists for his projects (e.g. "Devin Townsend Project", "Devin Townsend Band", "Casualties of Cool" etc.) and moved the releases accordingly. I linked them all to the "Devin Townsend" artist, so they are still included in the discography (and also in release polls for DT).

I will continue to create these relations for the most high-profile artists. I also added relations between artists and releases, to prepare for modelling collaborations correctly. Once this feature seems stable I might also make it available to all users, so that all of you can suggest relations for your favorite artists.

This is what is currently supported:

1. Specifying an ownership/inclusion between artists, which leads to the "owned" artists being included in discography and polls (e.g. "Devin Townsend" owns/includes "Devin Townsend Project")
2. Specifying a band membership (e.g. "Peter Gabriel" is a member of "Genesis"), which leads to the inclusion of releases in polls (e.g. PG polls also contain Genesis releases and vice versa) but not discographies.
3. Specifying a band membership on the release level (e.g. "Devin Townsend" was a member of the band on "Steve Vai - Sex & Religion") which leads to the inclusion in discography and polls.

What do you think?

I like the idea of this, but I suspect that it will be a monster task for you to update and maintain. Will there be a way when adding a new artist or a new album for the users to assist with adding this information? How will this work for a "supergroup" like Transatlantic, where all of the members are members of other groups...and also, possibly, solo artists?

I have already added some relations for Neal Morse and Mike Portnoy, so the Transatlantic releases appear on their discographies. I will make this available for editing in some fashion, probably for everyone with an approval step.

^ Obviously you are correct in pointing out that this would be a gargantuan effort to do for all the artists in the database. I'm a big fan of the 80/20 rule, which can also work "in reverse": If we manage to do this for the top 20% artists we'll reap about 80% of the benefits. So my goal is to do this for the really high profile artists first, and it is not a big problem when some links are missing. Think of it as an augmentation of the database.

What triggered me to do this was when I looked at the Devin Townsend discography and realized that it bothered me that the DTB releases were listed just as DT. But I did not want to have them as a separate artist because there should be an artist entry which lists everything related to Devin Townsend.

Feel free to ping artists in this thread which you think would benefit the most from doing these splits (typically the case with artist "projects" and collaborations).

The way it works, for example for Transatlantic: I added the four band member links, which means that Transatlantic releases will be listed on their pages (e.g. Neal Morse). On the Transatlantic page the band member (solo) releases are not listed. But they will be available in Transatlantic artist polls.

So in essence, band member discographies will list their solo releases plus all the releases where they were band members and/or project leaders or collaborators. Band discographies will still only list the band releases, but the band members will be listed separately so you can click them, and the band polls will include all solo releases of band members (but not releases by other bands of the members).

why can't i rate things with a 4, 2, nor 1 anymore in rating categories?

please bring them back, i use "4" all the time...

the difference between a 3 and 0 is massive (considering i won't give a 0 to anything, in theory, but 1 is lowest bar for me), i don't understand what the point of doing that was...

oh and you made everything x.5 as well, except for 3 and 10. there's also a huge jump between 5.5 and 3.

please, again bring back 4 (or 4.5 idc), 2, and 1...

Edit: I would actually rather you go back to .0 increments... what's the point, for instance, of having 9.5 and 10, but then jumping from 5.5 to 3.0 (which pretty much excludes my entire personal "d-tier" rating of 3.5-5.0, and then some). 0-10 in 1.0 increments was the perfect way to go about it...

yeah honestly the removal of 4 is really, really frustrating ngl, makes me not want to use the rating system tbh

^ I'll look into it, but why post about it in this thread? This has nothing to do with links between artists.