As it stands, the artist crediting system is too simplistic. Having only one space for the artist name, and a space for the song title, is not good for songs with multiple artists. Often when crediting a song that has a featured artist, I have to cram that artist into the song title (example: “Here We Go Again ft. Tyler The Creator” by The Weeknd).
This is especially a big problem for songs that don’t have a clear lead artist, where the artists are credited as “and” instead of “featuring”. When a song has multiple lead artists, putting all their names into the Artist field causes a new page to be created, which is a huge bother. For a while, I’ve wanted to transcribe the song “Un Dia” by J Balvin, Dua Lipa, Bad Bunny, and Tainy; but I can’t find a proper way to credit the artists with the current system.
The best remedy for this problem would be to allow multiple artists to be separately credited on one song. When we upload a TheoryTab, there should be a button to add additional Artist fields. This would be especially beneficial for genres like hip hop, reggaeton, and regional Mexican music, where collaboration is a common practice. Please consider my suggestion, because I think it would really help us TheoryTab contributors.
The artist crediting system also needs to accommodate for soundtracks (shows, musicals, video games, etc). Currently, the database is a disaster for video game music, particularly Nintendo music, because people keep crediting the artists differently. Some credit the composer (e.g. Koji Kondo), some credit the video game/series (e.g. Mario Kart), some credit the company (e.g. Nintendo). They also may cram the video game name into the title, which already has limited characters. It’s a disorganized mess.
Crediting multiple artists would allow people to list the composer and the video game series. Perhaps there could be a dedicated “source” option for songs that come from a soundtrack. I don’t have a 100% concrete suggestion, but the artist crediting system in the database needs to be improved. As it stands, it’s an overly restrictive, confusing mess.
Honestly, there needs to be some sort of moderation of any kind. Once a TheoryTab is submitted to the site, it’s basically like that forever, mistakes and all.
I’m bringing this up again because more people have become active on this forum in the past year and I want to see if they have any thoughts on this. I still think the artist crediting system is in need of improvement
I totally agree with you in regards to collaborative work in popular music, but the issue with soundtracks lies in the fact that there is no official naming convention for those and so people start doing weird things. Crediting the manufacturer of the console (e.g. Nintendo, SEGA) as the artist is utter nonsense.
The artist is obviously the composer - there can’t be any disagreements about that. I think what we need first and foremost to fix the issue with video game music on the database is a unified naming convention that would ideally be included in the contributor guide.
I personally think “[Video Game Title] - [Song Title] by [Name of Composer]” is a perfectly fine way to label a song from a video game soundtrack. Video game composers often have rather large discographies and by putting the title of the video game first, the songs on the artist page are sorted by video game, which is very convenient if you ask me.
Unfortunately that system ceases to work when different songs within a soundtrack are written by different composers. I think the best solution for that issue would be an album feature, which would be a great feature anyway, not only for soundtracks.
Yeah the soundtracks thing is an entirely different beast and admittedly not my top priority, nor had I really thought out any actual plan. But for pop songs, I think being able to credit multiple artists separately is important.
Absolutely! I’ve experienced the conundrum of not having a clear lead artist myself, but even for songs with a clear lead artist it would be a big improvement if the Tab would show up on the featured artist’s pages aswell, similar to what we’re used to from streaming platforms like Spotify. Also song titles get much too convoluted if there’s multiple featured artists on a song.
might be useful to look at the MP3 tagging - there are a number of artist tags for composer, performance artist(s), involved person(s), etc which are fairly typical for enumerating everyone and their role.
for example, the composer might not ever have anything to do with the performance recorded and listened to (other than lyrics and music composition) whereas the performance artist could have interpreted the composition in any number of ways. so we might need to have the multiple artist entries as “properties” in the theory entry metadata vs trying to include it in the name of the piece. the exception being a single composer / performance artist.