Musicians' namespace

This might have been asked before, but why are music creators troped under Music/ and not Creator/? It seems like it's conflating the people behind the work (the band, composer, singer, etc.) with their work themselves (singles and album), and this feels just as bad as troping writers under the Literature/ namespace.

Music acts as a hybrid creator-work article for the following main reasons:

• Title confusion. Most musical artists are known as the name that they perform under, so having Creator.Paul Mc Cartney and Music.Paul Mc Cartney is redundant.
• Tropability. Most musical artists only perform music, so there is nothing that a Creator page would serve that isn't already covered in the Music article.
• Consolidation. We do most of the troping of an artist's work in a single article. Individual songs and albums don't typically get separate articles unless they are particularly tropable.

Put briefly, we keep them together because artists and their work are difficult to conceptually separate for troping purposes, and we aren't really troping the artists as people anyway. The same rules apply as on Creator articles: tropes may not be used to describe real people, only their work. Stage personas are tropable only if they are intentionally distinct acts, like with professional wrestlers and kayfabe.

The main exception is when a musical artist is also creator in other forms of media, especially when they are credited under their own name instead of their artist or band name. In that specific case, they would get a Creator page covering their entire body of work and a Music page specifically covering their music.

The guiding question is, "Where would a typical person looking for this individual expect to find them?"

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 17th 2022 at 12:47:17 PM

I suppose music, more than any other medium, blurs the lines between artist and work. Although tropes like Author Avatar and Write What You Know exist in all mediums, a lot of artists build their artistic identity around their raw realism and telling their true stories through their music (the only medium I see more of a non-divide between artist and work would be vloggers, but that's frequently so realistic they aren't tropable at all.)

Although yes, there is way too much of people troping musicians' private lives especially on their YMMV page (I see The Woobie waaaaaaaaay too much), although moving all artists and bands to the Creator namespace would leave the Music namespace incredibly barren (it would basically just be individual albums and songs, and I've seen people argue that no individual song is ever warranted of its own page, I don't agree but I think it's a spreading mindset), and creating separate Creator pages for the biographies of bands and artists would leave the Music pages largely without an intro.

The point is that the musical act is what's tropable, not the artist, so making separate Creator articles for them serves no purpose unless they also create other media.

We also have a cleanup thread in case you find any troping of musicians' un-tropeworthy private lives or NRLEP tropes.

Don't the same thing apply to other types of creators as well though? Most writers only write, and most actors and directors only produce Film works. Since we're not allowed to trope real life regardless, virtually all of the "tropes" that appear under the creator's page are stuff that appear in their work and their related Trivia. For example, would something like Creator.Agatha Christie be redundant since most of her works have their own pages, and a lot of the tropes listed in the Creator/ page are duplicates to the ones already on her novels' pages?

My point is not that we should have two separate pages for, say, Music.Paul Mc Cartney and Creator.Paul Mc Cartney. My question is why we can't just have the latter page, and reserve the music namespace for his albums or singles that have their own TVT pages?

Edited by Adept on Aug 17th 2022 at 10:16:04 PM

Most writers don't write works titled with their own names. Tom Clancy didn't write a single body of work that we title Literature.Tom Clancy.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 17th 2022 at 11:33:01 AM

Likewise, bands like Linkin Park have never released a song or album titled "Linkin Park", and yet they're still in the Music/ namespace.

With Paul McCartney, two of the solo albums that are named after him, McCartney and McCartney II, have their own pages. Most of his remaining discography have regular titles, and the list looks no different from, say, an actor's filmography or an author's list of publications. So as a page function, how is Music.Paul Mc Cartney different from Creator.Tom Clancy that they have to be in different namespaces?

Edited by Adept on Aug 18th 2022 at 12:14:01 AM

Well, the other side is that music is fuzzier about what constitutes a single work than other media. Does an individual song get its own page? What about different covers of the same song (even different performances of the same song)? An album, which doesn't usually represent a single narrative (outside of concept albums) and may recycle songs from prior releases? The current approach is that the work of a band is the band's entire discography, which then becomes more or less redundant to a creator page. (Things like Music.Danny Elfman should be in Creator/, though.)

It isn't really any different from other mediums. A short work can have its own article. Songs are rarely using enough tropes to prevent the article from being a stub, but it isn't forbidden. A one-minute Short Film rarely has enough tropes to make anything other than a stub article, but it isn't forbidden. Impractical, but not forbidden.

Derivatives, such as a cover, follow similar rules, although I advocate that tropes present in the original should only appear in the article for the derivative if there's a significant change to the original.

An album has additional tropes that the individual songs don't have, such as cover art and certain marketing tropes. In addition, songs that don't have enough examples to form a page can easily be collected on the article for the album. Beyond that, the article for the album can index the songs if they have articles.

However, due to a relative dearth of music-focused tropes, the body of work by the musician/band tends to be placed on the medium-specific franchise article identified by the name of the musician/band. Making non-stub articles for every song and every version of every song is impractical, so they're consolidated into a form that is practical; a single-medium franchise page identified by the creator's name. Those usually have plenty of content.

Now that Music.Danny Elfman has been brought up, there is indeed a question as to how composers are namespaced (I'm under the impression they should be under Music/, that page included). The problem is, as my combing the namespace found, a lot of those merely list works they're involved in, and not a single trope as a work page should. Some migrations would no doubt be easier than others, like when I moved Creator.NobuoUematsu to Music.Nobuo Uematsu. There's a lot of work-related examples to work with, but I suppose there's still a nagging question of where they definitively should be.

Now someone who makes music but is just as well known, if not better known, for something else I have no problem. Creator.Toby Fox for example is fine as is.

I didn't say that (like I said, my understanding is the opposite). I just am pointing out there isn't a universal understanding on how composer pages are treated, since many lack a single trope while under a work namespace.

Edited by GrafVonTirol on Aug 18th 2022 at 9:42:05 AM

Yep, this. One thing to note is that the vast majority of Music/ pages do not look like Music.Paul Mc Cartney or that of other A-listers (ie. long on their own, a page for each album, some singles getting their own page). They look like [hits random media] Music.Fiona Apple. If you view them as lumping together the tropes about each potential Music/ page of albums, concert tours, and songs rather than troping the band itself, it makes more sense.

Conversely, Creator.Agatha Christie should be written as a career retrospective, not redundantly troping her novels. There's a difference in value when one explains how she used a trope across her career vs. elaborating how it's played straight And Then There Were None.

I think the more pertinent confusion is in the case of multihyphenates and crossover artists, a discussion which you can resurrect here.

Edited by Synchronicity on Aug 18th 2022 at 10:11:10 AM

The Fiona Apple page might not be a good example of why musicians should be in a Music/ namespace instead of Creator/ since it lists several tropes that pertain to the artist's career rather than individual work (Self-Deprecation, Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, Singer-Songwriter, Stage Name), and I've seen actual Creator/ pages with less.

Huh. That's something I wasn't aware of. Composers go to Creator? If so, why would they be distinguished from the performers?

Don't visual artists (e.g. painters, sculptors) have the same issue though? Few of their individual artpieces have enough tropes to have its own page, so the artist page would function as "a single-medium franchise page identified by the creator's name", but the artist is not namespaced under Art/

Yes, if we were to follow this principle strictly, someone like Pablo Picasso would be namespaced under Art, with the article serving as both creator and work page. As it stands, the Creator page is doing most of that work.

Frankly, the Music thing is somewhat arbitrary. We could just as easily have Creator.The Beatles instead of Music.The Beatles.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 18th 2022 at 12:43:04 PM

I have a long-standing grudge against mis-namespacing of composers' pages, the poster child being Johannes Brahms. Maybe this is our chance to finally get them into Music/.

Why would we try to move composers from Creator/ to Music/? Johannes Brahms isn't a composition.

Neither is Taylor Swift. What's your point here?

That Music/ is for works made in a medium and Creator/ is for people. Music/ is the only medium namespace that works differently, and fixing it would entail making it more like the others.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Aug 18th 2022 at 7:21:32 PM

Web Video/ would like to have a chat with you, then. :P Multiple pages in that namespace are also pseudo-creator pages due to the creators using their real name as the channel name.

The thing about music is that the musicians are part of the package. You don't get the song without the singer, you don't get the concert without the performance, the musician is just as important to the product as the actual songs are. And yeah, I know, you can't have games without game designers and you can't have books without authors and all that, but it does feel like there's a difference here. You can't separate the music from the musicians as easily as you can separate other works from their creators, simply because that music can't really exist in isolation in the way that a book can be treated as a separate property from the author.

Am I making sense?

No, I get that, I made a similar justification upthread with the reasoning that a band's discography is the work being troped - and similar to a television series whose writing staff can change over time, the composition of the band can too. If the band is just one person or no one involved did anything else notable, a Creator/ page would be redundant, but I can imagine moving the entry there to distinguish between troping real people and their stage personas. But if we're talking about a musician who has contributed to multiple bands and has their own independent composition career (using Music.Danny Elfman as my example), they should have a Creator/ page. Under no circumstances can I imagine moving, I don't know, Creator.Aaron Sorkin to Series/ just because of the medium he works in. I would apply the same logic to WebVideo/.

Classical composers like Brahms also don't have stage personas so its weirder to think of their collective body of work as a single piece of art.

Was speaking in terms of length, not content.

I think the main reason several composers were made in Creator/ isn't namespace confusion but that is that it is very difficult to trope classical music. Music.Robert Schumann tropes his life, not his compositions, and should really be cut or converted to Creator/ (unless we lay down a rule here).

Yes, this is exactly my point. Creator articles are for individuals who have contributed to multiple works (defining "musical act" here as a single work), or who have only contributed to one work but are not the totality of that work (such as a voice actor). Web Video works the same way as Music: someone known primarily as their YouTube channel would be placed in that namespace. Someone who also acts or has a musical career or whatever would be put in Creator/, but there would still be a Music or WebVideo article for their work in those mediums.

Interestingly, we don't have a Comedy namespace when one would expect stand-up comedians (e.g., Ron White) to follow this same principle.

Some of these individuals may be considered Public Domain Characters and would thus qualify for Useful Notes articles, which is where all the biographical stuff would go. But "troping their life" is absolutely forbidden no matter which namespace is used.

For composers who are really only known for their work, moving them to Music/ makes sense. If it is not possible to find tropable content in said work, then they either should not have a wiki article or should go in Useful Notes if they are frequently referenced in media.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 18th 2022 at 3:07:53 PM

Music isn't generally an artform with a narrative (at least, not one that can be expressed as a story), but it has its own distinct tropes (e.g. "Psycho" Strings or Minsky Pickup - in fact, the fact that musical narrative is nontextual in content means its tropes are more unique). It's just relatively unexplored on TVT compared to textual/verbal media.

Of course. Music, like Art and Video Games, has its own set of tropes that are unique to the medium and establish tropability without the need for a specific narrative. We still have to be careful to avoid falling into the trap of troping the creators, which happens far too often on this site.

We would never allow, say, Tom Cruise's personal life to be troped on the article for Top Gun. The same applies everywhere else but people don't seem to be able to figure that out.

I wonder when the decision was made (if it ever was) not to have a medium namespace for stand-up comedy.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 18th 2022 at 3:12:33 PM

Honestly it might gain traction now if you propose it; streaming has made it much more accessible IMO.