[x] Collectives

In trying to verify an entry I found myself thinking "What makes a collective a band and does not reduce it to one or two people?". Take 'The Tower Recordings' a folk collective in NY with the legendary 'rotating cast' syndrome. Their founder/director/flint (his own words), Matt Valentine says "I can’t speak for other members of the collective concerning the future, but I certainly will continue to orchestrate large ensemble happenings that will be billed under the T.R. cosmic roof."
In other words, Valentine has carte blanche to make 'The Tower Recordings' whoever he wants, whenever he wants. So what makes ANY other people in this collective members? What makes their role any different from (say) being invited by Bob Geldof to be part of his 'Band Aid' collective for a day or two.
Do we just take the CD's word for it and assume unless explicitly told otherwise that all participants are members for however brief a period and that, as is often with collectives, two members may not have actually played together that the whole ensemble has some cohesion that makes them a single unit even if, in all likelihood, they are mostly just there at Valentine's whim?
I have no real problem with - it just seems that our whole dB basic premise is 'rockist' in that there will be a classic 'band' line-up and it will be recordable while other genres (jazz too), which might get less hung up about whether it's Dio Mk V or Deep Purple Mk VII we're talking about, have a fluidity to them where this 'band line-up' concept is much less important and, by simply taking the bare-faced info provided, we let in alliances that are much less substantial than others we disbar and this ends up being purely on the basis of form or presentation - not substance.
[www.dreamgeo.com] http://www.dreamgeo.com/MattValentine.html

This is certainly a very difficult and very valid concern. You are definitely correct in that our basic premise is "rock-ist" and based upon the idea of a single cohesive unit and that it becomes fuzzy as we move away from that ideal. It would be very difficult to legislate an exact ruling for these sorts of occurances at the fringe of our Rules (or at least I can't think of a way to do it) so I think we can only do the best we can with these circumstances.

In this specific case I would say that as a band moves away from the classic ideal and towards the collective end of the spectrum the validity of the "band" becomes more in doubt and at some point (although I can't say exactly where) it becomes more probable that there is a central core and the rest are extraneous. The burden of proof then falls on trying to show that it is in fact a single band, as in the case of Centipede, or just a central core with guests, as in Band Aid. Unfortunately since it does become very fuzzy at these sort of extremes relative to the classic "rock-ist" ideal there is no easy answer.


Kevin