Multi-artist albums

I think it would help the new Rule 6a look much more sensible if the database could show you multiple artists on one album. I'm not sure whether you'd have to actually have only one album entry in the database backend or you could leave things as they are now and just have some sort of special flag on albums to indicate that multiple different albums were the same (maybe all albums with the same image for artwork?). In any case, from the user perspective, you'd look at an album and get an entry which showed the album just like it does for a multi-lineup situation, except the second band's name and members would appear instead of a second lineup. So for an A & B album you might get

A & B
/Albumname/
/Year/

/A/
[list of A's members]

/B/
[list of B's members]


This would make it clear that the bands are treated distinctly and note what bands on the album are in our database, without forcing you to look at multiple different "albums" to get the same data.

I've been wanting this for awhile but it really crystalized with the new rule wording; I think being able to show Frank Zappa & the Mothers Of Invention or Queen + Paul Rodgers this way would be much less confusing than showing them as totally "separate" releases.

This will happen. The key is to flag the album with the "collaboration" checkbox when the album is added. That will allow the album to be flagged that it needs to load two different line-ups. It will still require that the same album is added into the system twice with the different line-ups for the different bands but they will be pulled up properly when the album is loaded from either band's page.

I realize I need to open that option on the wiki live editing side of things but this will be all worked out.


Kevin

My one concern is that if we have two entries, how will the system know what the collaboration's name is?

For example, if we have "Queen" and "Paul Rodgers", how will it know that the name for the unified album should be "Queen + Paul Rodgers" instead of just joining the parties involved with "&"? Perhaps in this case the difference is small, but on other collaborations the word "And" or something else might be used. This is one reason why I feel like it might be better to have a single album entity in the DB, with multiple separate artists listed on it (instead of saying one album == one artist and then faking up a unified album from the user's perspective). If your DB says an album is "the following list of artists" which are not treated as sharing membership, everything works automatically.

I think that problem can be easily solved if correctly applied in the database design. This is typically something that needs a seperate database table with three entries: a reference to the first band, one to the second band and thirdly the unified name.

Well sure, that would work. I just think making albums inherently capable of being multi-artist would save one table, one album entry, and some processing. I don't really see the design advantage in making albums exactly one artist (then again I don't do much with databases so I could be missing something obvious).

I have no idea how the current database is designed but that's how I would do it. But maybe it doesn't work very well together with the linking algorithm so I guess it's all up to Kevin and his rockers.