Musical Artist

Musical Artist: Adding a founders property

2008-05-27T19:37:51.0007Z

Not a bad idea.

It’s a kind of denormalization, though; when there are dates, you can tell who was a member of the group at its earliest dates.

When we run into a denormalization issue, what usually makes the difference is the use cases. Is there something particular you want to do with founders? Is it just something that would be cool to see? How hard is it to find founders without it?

You are right that this belongs on Musical Group rather than Musical Artist, though. The dates you mention are the start and end of musical careers; it applies to individuals as well as to groups (though, unlike groups, the individuals exist before and sometimes after their careers).

Musical Artist: Adding a founders property

2008-05-23T19:13:19.0024Z

There should be an additional property for the founders as distinguished from members, thought maybe this would fit better in the music group type since the notion of a founder for an individual artist would usually be an odd fit. On the other hand, dates of founding and dissolution are in the music artist type, so maybe founder should be in proximity to those.

Musical Artist: Duplicate person records

2007-09-03T17:42:25.0000Z

OK... I found the "merge with another topic" menu item... :-)

Musical Artist: Duplicate person records

2007-09-03T17:01:26.0012Z

Hello!

First day freebasing...

Paul Masvidal has two records:

http://www.freebase.com/view/paul_masvidal
http://www.freebase.com/view/%239202a8c04000641f8000000003adb80a

Is there a standard procedure for merging duplicate records?

Thanks,

Ed Cavazos

Musical Artist: Similar artists is not symmetric

2007-08-24T23:11:24.0007Z

Chris, it seems like we should model this like 'sibling' on person or 'adjoining' on location -- I know the case can be made that assertions should be made in one direction in this case, but I don't think that's what people expect.

Musical Artist: Similar artists is not symmetric

2007-08-23T03:23:01.0012Z

If I say A is similar to B, it doesn't make B similar to A

Musical Artist: Cardinality seems wrong

2007-07-11T00:11:12.0009Z

oh, and i was just told that this change has been made on sandbox.freebase.com so you can have a look and feel free to comment.

Musical Artist: Cardinality seems wrong

2007-07-11T00:07:55.0007Z

wbecker, i think your suggestion is spot on, and i've been thinking about this too. we did the music domain before we had the "included types" feature so we did our best to create a catch-all. but you're right, its confusing and doesn't really work all that well. now that we have the included types, we're looking at moving the members property over to a musical group type, which i think is the only property that doesn't really make so much sense. i think this'll be done in the next few weeks. hope this helps, and sorry for taking so long to get back to you on this!

Musical Artist: Reinventing the wheel

2007-06-28T19:33:03.0007Z

Funny you should mention that. Take a look at most of the music instances; you’ll find that our database was populated with MusicBrainz data. We also just participated in MusicBrainz Summit 8 to talk about the next-generation MusicBrainz data model and are converging our data model with theirs (though with a slightly different focus).
The “needle-dropping bamboo” model was killed at that meeting, BTW, in favor of the “symmetric bridges of London.” (-:

Musical Artist: Reinventing the wheel

2007-06-28T09:36:04.0005Z

I'd recommend anyone interested in the issues involved here to check out Musicbrainz.org

They've been working through similar issues for several years now and have some good plans in place for a revised data schema

Musical Artist: Cardinality seems wrong

2007-05-19T03:17:02.0017Z

Hi,

I think my biggest gripe is that last point. Got no problems with musical artist, just having stuff lumped in with them that should be on a more specific type!

Musical Artist: Cardinality seems wrong

2007-05-18T20:23:53.0019Z

I’m not entirely sure if you’re objecting to the musical artist type itself or just some of its properties. The artist type itself is pretty solid; it’s industry terminology to talk of “recording artists” and we definitely need the notion of “an entity who performs and/or records music.”
The labels for those properties are still evolving, though, and I’m not completely happy with them yet. For instance, sometimes an entire group plays on someone else’s album, though usually it’s just one person. I do agree that the band-related properties (origin, members) could be moved to a band type. This is worth thinking about.

Musical Artist: Cardinality seems wrong

2007-05-17T00:51:59.0011Z

"A Musical Artist can describe either an individual musician or a band of musicians"

This seems wrong, considering you have included types! Should you have Musical Artist which is an either an individual or an (abstract) parent and then have specialised types that add either special types for individuals and/or groups?

Having all these (if groups) things seems wrong semantically.

Musical Artist: I don't find the filter 'Songs Composed' all that useful right now

2007-05-11T21:32:53.0006Z

The songs composed property has been moved to songwriter. Hope that helps!

Musical Artist: I don't find the filter 'Songs Composed' all that useful right now

2007-04-27T21:14:14.0012Z

I really think 'Songs Performed' is what is really necessary/desired here. May have been the intended filter for songs I bet.

Ex. I am searching for the group who does "Don't Look Back" (Boston) and I attempt that filter setting in 'Songs Composed' and got no results...I know that eventually composer info will get entered into some of the tens of thousands of musical tracks but even so, popular songs are often composed by individuals who are often not part of the group performing the song (1900's-1960's almost all songs composed outside of the performing artist/group). The result should come back as 'Tom Scholz' I think, but only a big time Boston fanatic (I am not and never was such an individual) would then know the group must be Boston.

Musical Artist: Band Members with Multiple Roles

2007-04-18T00:55:44.0003Z

Thanks faye, crism, and danm!

Musical Artist: Band Members with Multiple Roles

2007-04-18T00:46:59.0006Z

We hope to fix this UI limitation in an upcoming release. In the meantime - you can also add multiple roles by going through the view link (roll your mouse over the band member and select 'view' -- from there you can add multiple roles) - once the UI is fixed, the multiple roles will appear separated by commas.

Musical Artist: Band Members with Multiple Roles

2007-04-18T00:45:35.0019Z

Hi Faye, thanks for the quick replies on both posts! It's interesting to know why this works as it does.

What do you think the ideal is here? There are some musicians who play so many roles, we could easily end up with types like "keyboardist, vocalist, percussionist, accordionist"...which of course would be distinct from "keyboardist, vocalist, accordionist, percussionist". I could imagine this getting out of hand quickly.

(Without knowing what the pain/unintended consequences of changing the constraint are) changing this constraint sounds like an interesting possibility. I'd love to know more about the pluses and minuses of changing the design to allow for multiple roles.

If that turns out to be unworkable...do we want to encourage roles that are lists ("keyboardist, vocalist, percussionist, accordionist")? A catchall role ("multiple")? Or something else?

Musical Artist: Band Members with Multiple Roles

2007-04-18T00:40:44.0006Z

Good point, Jeff. There used to be a reason why we didn’t want to have multiple roles on a compound value or mediator, but that reason has gone away. Accordingly, we’ve relaxed the restriction on the role played by an artist in a group.
However, the UI will still only show the first role as a disambiguator. For example, take a look at The Police; Sting is now modeled as the lead singer and the bassist. However, when you look at The Police, you’ll only see that he’s the lead singer; you have to View the compound value to actually see that he’s the bassist as well.

Musical Artist: Band Members with Multiple Roles

2007-04-18T00:29:35.0006Z

Hi Jeff, I replied to your other post. The schema is set up in exactly the same way for both types (as a mediator with uniqueness/disambiguator type hints), and that's why data entry is restricted the way it is through Freebase. Take a look at the schema for Music Group Membership (link below), for example. Open up each property and see how it's set up. You can also click on the topics (the long string of characters in the topic name is the guid) to see what a mediator looks like.

http://www.freebase.com/view/schema?id=%2Fmusic%2Fgroup_membership

HTH.

Musical Artist: Band Members with Multiple Roles

2007-04-18T00:18:26.0034Z

I was adding band members, and was frustrated to have to choose between giving compound roles (e.g "Dancer, Vocalist, Percussionist"), creating multiple entries, or just listing one of several roles.

Is there a desired way to handle band members with multiple roles? I would ideally like to see something like:
Dandha Da Hora - Dancer, Vocalist, Percussionist
...where each role listed after the name is its own type.

Note, I posted a very similar question about employees with multiple titles (e.g. Founder, Chief Architect) in Business::Company. Perhaps the same solution will work for both areas?