[x] Determining official membership for collectives

Since I haven't been around for a while, maybe someone can get me up to speed.

I'll take Pigface for an example here, but this applies generally.

What makes us willing to say that Pigface has simultaneous membership of dozens of people just based on the album cover saying something like "This incarnation is <list of people>" ( [www.bandtoband.com] http://www.bandtoband.com/images/evidence/live/48447.1.jpg ), when we by contrast have sites like [www.rockbites.com] http://www.rockbites.com/newsByMonth/2003February/2003February24-1.html -- cited in the wiki notes for the album! -- which say things like "The band has no official membership apart from Atkins"?

In general, I guess my concern is that when I see a band that claims to have 30 members on each release, and 29 of them change every release, and pages online say the 1 unchanging person is the only "official member", that seems on both a gut feeling level and an evidentiary level to suggest that these performers are closer to "guests" than "members".

The rules don't really make this distinction very clear; the critical phrase is "intentionally joined the collective whole of the band". OK, so how do we know that, say, Penn Jillette joined Pigface and worked with the collective whole, as opposed to just sending in some sound snippets or something? Doesn't it seem rather unlikely that on each release dozens of people will want to "join the collective whole" but then won't want to stay long enough to make more than one release? I realize that's not how Pigface operates, but that's sort of my whole point: this doesn't look like a _band_ to me.

Now, I am not very knowledgeable on Pigface, and for all I know there's actually a really solid chunk of evidence for them specifically to be treated as a band. So I guess what I'm really asking is whether we shouldn't be skeptical of membership, and generally err on the side of "if you're not obviously a member, you're a guest"? I'd rather have the graph not have extra connections that it really doesn't deserve...

My second paragraph in my post at [www.bandtoband.com] http://www.bandtoband.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11888 probably addresses this. In the case of Pigface, for example, we have Pigface's own words ( [bandtoband.com] http://bandtoband.com/images/evidence/live/2136.1.jpg and [bandtoband.com] http://bandtoband.com/images/evidence/live/4114.1.jpg ) and enough b2bers who voted in that direction. I agree that it does feel a little odd sometimes though.

Hmm. It would sure make me feel better in a case like this if there were some kind of interview or something where the band leader makes clear how he views the other members. I'm a big fan of using the band's own intent as the ultimate authority (any strict rules we make will end up jutting poorly against the messy real world), but I've also seen a lot of album booklets whose presentation of members is misleading or downright wrong compared to what the people in the band actually say. (Makes me wonder sometimes how much editorial control bands have over their album booklets...)

I like the idea that someone can be a member of a collective despite making the most fickle of contributions. Someone wanting to be part of The BandToBand Band might only have time to make a short squeak. But if they're emotionally invested and playing along with the idea, why not?

There's more discussion on 'undeserved' connections here:
[www.bandtoband.com] http://www.bandtoband.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11445

In that thread I said it's impossible to draw a clear line between what's a supergroup and what isn't. But maybe we could apply the "I know it when I see it" adage when deciding which groups make cheap/undeserved connections and which don't.

Big City Orchestra (in queue) also has 1 unchanging person plus a revolving cast. They might be a good example of a collective with not enough famous contributors to really have any repercussions:
[www.discogs.com] https://www.discogs.com/artist/99064-Big-City-Orchestra

Wrote a long post here, but deleted it after posting, because I think I'm being too harsh.

I do agree with you that there's no real bright line. As you said in the thread you link to, there's a spectrum of contributions here, and even if we could draw a line for what we _wanted_ to exclude, it would be difficult to know for sure that we were doing it right with many groups.

That said, I don't think that's a reason to just shrug and say that anything on a liner note is good enough to go in. As ajw says in that thread, we might as well just index all of discogs.com in that case. Or include known session musicians, at the very least, since we know they _played_ on the album, and made some of the notes you're hearing when listening.

I'm uneasy with a world in which we still claim to distinguish between members and non-members/session artists/guests on one hand, but say on the other hand that we've relaxed the rules enough that we'll trust "what a band says" about its membership on the other. See my recent thread on Megadeth and Chris Adler, which you guys both contributed to, and how the album booklet appears to make Chris a full member in every way.

So yeah, in the end, I do think we have to apply "I'll know it when I see it" rules. But I encourage everyone to be skeptical when doing so. I don't want to cheapen the DB by routing everything through supergroups. I don't think the point of this site is to try to get every band in the world in, it's to document the real connections between bands, the way that people spending real time and effort to join with others to make music can still span a huge fraction of what we've heard recorded. We aren't perfect, the real world is messy, and we're never going to get a set of rules that is unimpeachable, but if, as Mark said in the thread he links to below, the standard now is closer to "anything is OK if you can convince two other people of your views", then I would ask that people try to err on the side of skepticism. I'm sure there's still tens of thousands of bands we can get in with little disagreement even if we're stingy :)

I guess I'll mark this resolved. But don't count on me to vf things that look like Pigface...