[x] Legal Name Changes Post Musical Career?

Let's make a couple of assumptions, which are factually incorrect but bear with me for the sake of arguement.

If Cat Stevens was in the database as Cat Stevens and then runs off and changes his name to Yusuf Islam and never released another record, should his name in the database be changed to:

Yusuf Islam||Cat Stevens

I'm not so sure that it needs to be. The name Yusuf Islam has no relevence to the world of music so I'd be happy to stick with Cat Stevens. This relieves the need for us to keep tabs on musicians after their musical career ends.


Kevin

I think the legal name conventions are, in toto, hazy, imprecisely defined, difficult to verify, different for different geographies and countries and not always helpful.

That said, they are what they are and I'd rather have a full discussion of them rather than attack this element piecemeal. For example, let's say Harry Webb never released anything under his real name but all his (sometimes excellent I kid ye not) music as Sir Cliff Richard. Does Harry Webb need to feature in the dB? There are literally hundreds of people in the dB with this other-way-round-same-problem.

For now, for me, leave as is unless and until we have a full discussion.

... because then we'd be able to leave Janita Haan in the db as she is, and adding more Babe Ruth albums will be a lot simpler.

I agree with basically everything misterpomp says here. Let's has out the actual purpose of the names we put in the DB and nail down how we're going to get them, and hopefully other answers will fall out of that. Right now the only overriding principle/purpose I'm aware of is that we try to be "useful" or "what people would expect", which are way too vague.

PK, I never really was behind your "per album real names" approach until now, although now I'm envisioning it with a twist. In light of what MrP dug up here ( [bandtoband.com] http://bandtoband.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1474 ) and Kevin's point about real names never used in the music context, it seems like we could avoid all controversy by linking a person's name on an album directly to the ArtistId instead of to a static official name.

What I'm thinking of could cause a lot of confusion and headaches (in many, many ways) and I'm not actually proposing that we do it because I like the "real names" if only for information's sake, but an example might be something like this.

Instead of

Scott Torguson||Scott
and
Scott Torguson||Scott Eric Torguson
and
Scott Torguson||Scott E. Torguson
and
Scott Torguson

we could do something that amounts to

14635||Scott
and
14635||Scott Eric Torguson
and
14635||Scott E. Torguson
and
14635||Scott Torguson

Then we'd never have to figure out which is Scott's proper name, and there'd be no need to wonder if Scott is short for Prescott or long for Sco.

Mark's proposal is very intriguing for a number of reasons. If we reduce an artist to a number, while that might be a little cold, it does solve our problem of keeping track of a person's real name over time and just list how he appears on an album. This is a *very* good thing. I have a few concerns however:

1. Do we want to disregard potentially useful information such as Sid Vicious' real name is John Ritchie? With this new system we would, although I could probably live with that.

2. What do we do for a default fall back? If we have one album and human 14635 appears as Scott on that, what do we do when human 14635 appears on a new album but there are no liner notes? Do we then dig up his last name and use that? What if that last name changes? We are back to our initial problem it would seem.

3. To emphasis #2, the same default problem exists for mapped links. What happens when a link between two albums features two different names for human 14635? We're back to the default option problem.

As a very, very interesting by-product of this new proposal, and this is something I'm sure a few people out there would like, we can extend Mark's idea to bands as well. If that were the case, the "The" Rule, as much as I like it, would go away immediately. If band 4 appeared as "The Misfits" on one record and "Misfits" on another, we could display that name which is appropriate and lose nothing in the process. This is actually the band alias which a few people have tried to champion before and if this is the exact approach that people had been suggesting, it's my fault for not understanding it fully earlier.

Mrpomp, you may get Ultravox! just yet although I wish this had been conceived about 5000 bands ago...


Kevin

I like the 'Just assign them a record # and be done with it' approach for ease of understanding, although I share the slight concern about ditching useful info already and yet to be garnered. Our brief is not to record name changes, but that is a very interesting part of what we record.

I agree we have a problem when no name is given, but that's not a new problem - and that will always be a problem no matter what system we use.

For mapped links, my recurring request is that all names used in a link should be displayed so if (under the potential new system) artist 14635 went as 'Bill' under an album and 'Ben' under a linked album; the link should display as 14635||Bill||Ben.

I like the thought that band aliases could flow from this giving us better control over Ultravox!, Time Box, Sugarcubes etc.

However! The potential problem with the numbers is in inputting. I know that if I input 'Todd Rundgren' I'll get a match to an existing record - do I have to remember that Todd is God ... sorry Todd is 20251 in order to enter him now?

... My main concern is the issue of people changing their name (through marriage, affectation, fleeing the law, whatever). As soon as an existing artist does that, we then have to update the db.

Now, if we decided as a rule to put artists in the db under:

1) The "real" full name (along with whatever necessary UK, US 2 suffixes etc.) that they were born with, however obscure that info be (e.g. Peter Robinson for Chris Spedding, Cecil Ingram Connors for Gram Parsons)

2) A second optional field for artist's real name at time of recording (note: not *releasing*) an album

3) A third, also optional, field for artist's name as it appears on the release itself

... we would (a) cover all our bases, (b) provide all the interesting information that we factophiles adore, and (c) provide a foundation for each artist that we would not then need to change every entry in the db if for example, um, lessee ... Madonna Ciccone suddenly became (let's go wild here) Madonna Ritchie.

In that way, no actual changes would be needed in 99% or more of the db, as the existing "real name" on the db *would* be the name to be used as the key.

If and when we discover that Max Hardman's real name is Jasmine Piddle, a widget could be run to move all the instances of Max Hardman from the first "real name at birth" field into that second optional "name at recording of album" field, and Jasmine Piddle would go into the "real name at birth" field.

We would then also have no arguments as to what the artist should be entered as, because as soon as the info comes to light on the web as to the artist's true name at birth, that's it, no more argument.

C'maaaaahn, think about it, you *know* it makes sense ...

I definitely do not like the idea of everyone being a number.

I AM NOT A NUMBER!!!!!!

(Even if you use my name as an example.)

I didn't mean to suggest that people would be displayed as numbers or that any visitor to the site would ever seen the numbers (except those that are part of the URL). I just used the number to illustrate how the system would work behind the scenes. The Search Tree function could/would still find all of a person's work based on name only, and the artist page would just say something like "This musician is a member on the following albums" with "Appears as ..." language next to each album (or not).

There are other things to consider. Although some of the real name information would no longer have a place in most album listings, we could still use it on albums for which no credits are provided. And without the focus on real names, there'd be no reason to give people with unknown real names a lesser status (see
[www.bandtoband.com] http://www.bandtoband.com/index.php?Page=Search&AlbumId=12231 ), which has its own implications. There might be increased confusion because real names and aliases would appear to receive equal treatment (for example, there's the real Todd Rundgren and then some guy who used Todd Rundgren as a stage name).

I think we can go somewhere with this and maybe reduce some headaches and disputes over the long run, but I'm not so sure it's worth it.

I suppose one thing we could do is list the person's birth and/or real name only on the master Artist display page and then display only the exact credits for the albums. It would amount to roughly the same data in the system, but then people wouldn't be bombarded with names they might not recognize every time they click on an album on which all members use aliases (like this one: [bandtoband.com] http://bandtoband.com/index.php?Page=Search&AlbumId=3939 ).

... links up with something I raised some time ago, whereby I had the idea that we might want to store some minimal biog of the artist (date of birth, place of birth, etc., name changes, date of death if relevant) somewhere hidden away in the db and display it when we show the artist's page. I believe it was vetoed on the grounds that it would be too much work to go out and find all that data out.

I like the idea of date of birth and {if relevant) death. If we can find it out, of course.

I can definitely make all this happen, including name inputs on the wiki side (which actually wouldn't change at all) but we're still left with the issue of default names. For bands, we've got the "The" Rules (which we get to keep) so that the main band page, trees, etc would all display "Thin Lizzy" while the one album page for "Thin Lizzie" would display that. The same goes for artists where their "real" name would only appear on the artist's specific page but determining the "real" name is still the problem.

I do not want to lose data so that although John Ritchie would never appear on the Sex Pistols album line-ups it would appear on the artist page as it does now, with "appeared as Sid Vicious" on all the albums. So arriving at the "real" name needs to work in a similiar fashion as it does now:

1. Use birth name. William Baily = Axl Rose
2. If a legal name change (US laws) occurs *during* the artist's musical career, ie there is a release by the artist when under the new name, whether displayed or not, then the default name is changed to the new legal name.
3. If we cannot confirm a legal name change, we don't switch. Is Madonna Ciccone now Madonna Ritchie? If we don't know for certainty, we don't switch.

I'm afraid Matt's suggestion of an artist blog while nice for us data nerds, is somewhat outside the realm of practicality. However I do encourage a running discussion on an artist's name in the Shambles forum where the artist's name can be searched upon and the info retrieved if needed. Think of a forum post as a running tally on an artist's name.

If adjustments need to be made to 1-3 above let's hear it.


Kevin

Holy crap, I go away for a few days and when I come back people are jumping on board with my long-held wish for artists to just be a "unique ID" with per-album names. Amazingness.

Obviously, I'm all for this. It's not identical to my original suggestion, which was that we have both per-album credited name _and_ per-album "real name" (in the case where we know what both were at the time), but this solution is simpler to deal with and potentially avoid a few of the issues that my suggestion has, so I'm willing to live with the tradeoff. It won't show John Ritchie's name on individual album pages, but on the other hand we might finally be able to come up with a crediting style for The Roots that isn't silly.

I'm still not certain I wish to disallow tracking of name changes post-musical-career. I don't think we need to go out of our way to track them, but I think it's arguably useful to have the possibility open, in case, say, a high-profile former musician converts to Islam and changes his name, and someone comes here trying to look up that name.

Clearly there are was we want to keep the unique IDs "behind the scenes" in the DB, but that's been mentioned already.

Woot.

In terms of band aliases, which would work similarly to artists, here is a test case:

[bandtoband.com] http://bandtoband.com/index.php?Page=Search&AlbumId=12307

Is everyone on the same page on this one?


Kevin

I agree - although the 'Joan of Arc' discography page will, I assume, also show the name as on that specific release? Conicidentally - this would also completely resolve the current '2preciious' issue - wouldn't it?