Allow entries for individuals who *haven't* made solo LPs?

[MadhattanJack]

If this is already on the to-do list, please ignore, but at some point I was given permission to link bands (i.e., collaborations) to their members. Since many of the bands I like didn't have members listed, I've been doing that off an on for the past week or so. But you can only add a member to a band's entry if that member has released a solo album in his/her own name, one or more of which has been added to the BEA database via a chart in the BEA database.

So while it's still a good/useful feature (and the Beatles, Radiohead, and Black Sabbath are all still covered), my concern is that some bands could have (and indeed already do have) incomplete member lists that will look kind of, well, dumb to people who don't know or understand what the limitation is. In some cases it could even be dumb-looking enough to offend casual visitors, making them less likely to become new members.

For an obvious example of what I mean: The Cure's Robert Smith has never released a solo album under his own name, but two Cure members, Phil Thornalley and Roger O'Donnell, have both done so. It's OK because none of those solo albums are in the BEA database — yet — but if they were, you could have a situation where the BEA entry for The Cure would have a line that says "Members: Phil Thornalley, Roger O'Donnell," with no mention of Robert Smith at all (or even Lol Tolhurst, for that matter), and no link to The Glove or Siouxsie & the Banshees (which Smith was in for about a year or so).

The same thing could happen with, say, the Sisters of Mercy (Wayne Hussey and Gary Marx could be listed without Andrew Eldritch), or even R.E.M. (Peter Buck and nobody else). Andrew Eldritch has never been in another band, but I think he should still be listed just so it won't look bad. Meanwhile, the R.E.M. guys were in the Hindu Love Gods, but that band would actually be in the same predicament because Warren Zevon was a member. (I'm sure there are lots of other examples!)

Presumably the solution to this is to allow artist entries for individuals who haven't made solo albums, but for all I know this would violate all the site's data integrity rules and maybe break everything completely. It might also lead to an increase in duplicate artist entries, though I wouldn't be too concerned about that personally.

So, maybe as a short-term stopgap measure, what we need is one of those help icons and a "hover box" to explain that member lists only include people who have released solo albums under their own name. That might at least help unruffle the feathers of people who are offended at seeing Debbie Harry as the only member of Blondie, for (another) example.

[albummaster]

Hi, thanks for posting. Fwiw, I agree pretty much with all your thoughts. The restriction at the moment to limit band members to those artists already in the database can/does highlight gaps that most people wouldn't expect to see. The original intent of the artist membership feature was to provide another way for visitors to navigate/browse between artists. I hadn't thought that it would be offensive to anyone, but I can now see that might be the case. As you suggested, a disclaimer/help text might help to explain why these gaps exist and I think that's the best/easiest way of handling it right now.

Taking the example of Robert Smith, if there was a link to his artist 'page', there'd be no albums to display for him on BEA since we don't currently list albums against an artist that are not directly credited to them. Whilst, it wouldn't 'break' anything to allow additional artists to be created/added to the database, it would add a lot of extra work for people administering the site and we'd have to decide whether to include session musicians, or people that may have only performed once with the band as members etc (this issue is somewhat contained by the current set-up where we can only add existing artists on the site as members, but leads to the issue with gaps that you've highlighted).