Nationality of artists - Suggestions - Forums : Best Ever Albums

LedZep

baystateoftheart wrote:

Bands are collaborations. The guidelines give The Beatles as an example of a collaboration.

Oh... I might have been tagging bands as "individual" all the time... And I even read the guidelines a while ago, but must've misread something. I thought it was something like RYM's system where they have bands as one entity, and an album by the Velvets & Nico as a collab. Waiting for AM's thoughts.
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CA Dreamin

Gender: Male
Location: LA

I think nationality should be based on where an artist/band originated, where most of music writing and recording takes place, where the majority of band members are from, etc. In some cases, the mixed nationality tag still applies. But Arcade Fire? They seem heavily Canadian to me. If Arcade Fire is labeled mixed, should Metallica also be labeled mixed because their drummer is from Denmark?

baystateoftheart
Neil Young as a butternut squash

Age: 29
Location: Massachusetts

Romanelli wrote:

baystateoftheart wrote:

Hayden wrote:

I think I'm getting confused with the membership category. Are bands considered collaborations?

I've changed Arcade Fire back to being Canadian. If Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are Australian and Fleetwood Mac are British, Arcade Fire are Canadian Laughing

. We claim them.

I admit, our nationality feature gets muddled and confusing at times, but we eventually make a consensus. Most 'big' Canadian musicians and celebrities are American citizens for tax reasons and whatnot, but that doesn't make it their nationality. I think Alanis Morissette, Joni Mitchell, Drake, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Justin Bieber, Feist, Leonard Cohen, Celine Dion, Neil Young, etc... are all Canadian through and through, despite American passports tucked away somewhere.

Bands are collaborations. The guidelines give The Beatles as an example of a collaboration.

And you can argue with the site rules, but Arcade Fire is clearly mixed nationality under them, so I'd appreciate if you didn't revert my edits based on what you feel the site rules should be.

It has nothing to do with tax status or citizenship - it's based on where musicians were born and raised to adulthood.

Quote:

"I think that makes Arcade Fire mixed nationality"

If your edits are incorrect, they will most certainly be reverted. Your change of the Arcade Fire nationality was based on, in your words, what you think. Hardly fair for you to chastise others for doing exactly what you did there. Right?

I would say that if there is an issue with determining a band nationality or a question as to which is right or wrong (Arcade Fire would be a great example of this), that maybe we have a way to flag an artist so that it can be reviewed by the site admin. This would be a much better solution than simply switching it back and forth at will.

My comment was definitely too snippy - sorry Hayden! Romanelli, there was no hypocrisy in those statements, but I'd rather not have an argument about semantics.
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baystateoftheart
Neil Young as a butternut squash

Age: 29
Location: Massachusetts

CA Dreamin wrote:

I think nationality should be based on where an artist/band originated, where most of music writing and recording takes place, where the majority of band members are from, etc. In some cases, the mixed nationality tag still applies. But Arcade Fire? They seem heavily Canadian to me. If Arcade Fire is labeled mixed, should Metallica also be labeled mixed because their drummer is from Denmark?

Does the bold part address your Metallica question?

albummaster wrote:

1. Solo artists. An individual is deemed to be from one country if they were born and raised to adulthood in one country. There might be exceptions to this e.g. artists who released work during childhood while in one country, but later moved to another. These will be treated on a case by case basis. If you were born in one country and raised in another, you would be considered of the other nationality if you went to that country whilst still in infancy and then remained living in that country until adulthood. If you were born in one country and spent your childhood moving between different countries, then an artist is assigned 'Mixed Nationality' e.g. Rufus Wainwright.

2. Collaborations. If all artists in the collaboration are of the same nationality (as defined above), the collaboration is also assigned the same nationality. If any of the main performers (e.g. lead vocalist, lead guitarist etc) are of different nationality to the rest of the group (as defined above), the artist may be assigned 'Mixed Nationality'. If a minor performer within the collaboration is of different nationality, the artist as a whole could still be assigned the majority nationality (e.g. if the input of the 'minor' performer does not materially define the sound of the group as a whole).

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Jameth

albummaster wrote:

1. Solo artists. An individual is deemed to be from one country if they were born and raised to adulthood in one country. There might be exceptions to this e.g. artists who released work during childhood while in one country, but later moved to another. These will be treated on a case by case basis. If you were born in one country and raised in another, you would be considered of the other nationality if you went to that country whilst still in infancy and then remained living in that country until adulthood. If you were born in one country and spent your childhood moving between different countries, then an artist is assigned 'Mixed Nationality' e.g. Rufus Wainwright.

2. Collaborations. If all artists in the collaboration are of the same nationality (as defined above), the collaboration is also assigned the same nationality. If any of the main performers (e.g. lead vocalist, lead guitarist etc) are of different nationality to the rest of the group (as defined above), the artist may be assigned 'Mixed Nationality'. If a minor performer within the collaboration is of different nationality, the artist as a whole could still be assigned the majority nationality (e.g. if the input of the 'minor' performer does not materially define the sound of the group as a whole).

That second point seems a little dithering, which might lead to some messy situations. What if a user can't decide if a group member of a different nationality is a primary contributor? Or, maybe some users will decide particular positions within a band never serve as primary contributors, even if musicians have differing levels of contribution (or just not perceive the difference, or just not care). Compare Lars Ulrich and Levon Helm, for instance, both drummers for their respective bands. Levon Helm is closer to a main performer, but is he all the way there?

It seems like it would be more straightforward to let an obvious majority rule, such as with Arcade Fire, Metallica, The Band, etc.
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Hayden

Location: CDMX

Not to get anything messier, but I do consider Lars Ulrich a 'lead' member of Metallica. I don't think I know a single person that considers Metallica a Danish-American band though.

Not sure I agree with AM here.

Being said, we're smart. We'll plough through and figure it out.

(BUT— I still vouch for Fleetwood Mac being mixed nationality... just saying...)

CA Dreamin

Gender: Male
Location: LA

baystateoftheart wrote:

Does the bold part address your Metallica question?

albummaster wrote:

...Collaborations. If all artists in the collaboration are of the same nationality (as defined above), the collaboration is also assigned the same nationality. If any of the main performers (e.g. lead vocalist, lead guitarist etc) are of different nationality to the rest of the group (as defined above), the artist may be assigned 'Mixed Nationality'. If a minor performer within the collaboration is of different nationality, the artist as a whole could still be assigned the majority nationality (e.g. if the input of the 'minor' performer does not materially define the sound of the group as a whole).

It's vaguely written, demonstrated through the word I enlarged. It says "may" be assigned mixed nationality. It doesn't say "must" be assigned mixed nationality. If it said "must", then yeah Arcade Fire, Metallica, etc. should be labeled mixed nationality. But it doesn't, so I believe it's up to the admins on a case-by-case basis. I think Arcade Fire should remain Canadian and Metallica should remain American, for that's where the bands formed and performed their early gigs, where the majority of their main members are from, and where they wrote and recorded most of their music. But I understand the case to switch them to 'mixed.' I'm fine with whatever the admins decide.

albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

A couple of issues being discussed here. The nationality of a band is currently derived from the nationality of the members (e.g. a group of Chinese nationals form a band in New York, the band would be Chinese). If a group of US nationals form a band in Toronto, the band would be American (under BEA guidelines). If the group are from different countries, the group could be Mixed. The main issue with the site is that it doesn't currently allow artists to have a dual/triple/quadruple nationality. Maybe it would fix things if we could assign artists to multiple nationalities, up to some upper limit (e.g. dual) and above this limit have 'Mixed' as a fall-back option (probably not as simple as that if dual nationality is not clear etc and probably why the 'may' word exists that CA Dreamin highlighted, as it's not easy to articulate all the possible nuances). Also, the site is not 'perfect' and I'm very happy to change things as we go along to improve it for everybody (subject to time constraints, as always).

The individual/collaboration field is to differentiate between people performing by themselves (solo artists) and people performing with others (collaborations). The purpose of this going forwards is to capture additional data for solo artists (e.g. gender, birthdays, ethnicity etc) and for collaborations to be able to assign individual members to groups, so that the when you visit an artist's page you can see who's in a particular group (and which other groups they appeared in) and for charts we get to see gender composition etc (to improve diversity of the charts by shining a light on it).

Hayden

Location: CDMX

Aight, so— apologies for a whole bunch of edits where I made band's individuals, but moving forward I'll do collaborations.

Would love to see the dual nationality option though. I think that could be a great edit. (Perhaps maxing at 2 like you said, and then any third nationality would be deemed mixed). If there's any easy copy+paste in the code to open a new bracket, that'd be great (I'm doubting it's that easy, but yeah). I think seeing a Japan/France mixed nationality or a Thai/Swedish mixed nationality being represented under their flags makes a huge difference in description compared to just the UN flag for mixed.

Hayden

Location: CDMX

I'm just going to post this here instead of creating an entirely new thread, but I just want to point out we need updated flags for—

Lesotho
Libya
&
Mauritania (this one's rather new)

And I feel like we should have Isle of Man as an available option. It is somewhat in the same category as Guernsey, Jersey, etc...

No rush. Just wanted to point those out.