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discography of primary artist with backing band

Because an artist can have multiple backing bands (and both can change their names), I expect an artist's solo discography to include albums that also bill the artist's backing bands.  For most artists, Allmusic does a pretty good job pulling in albums that are billed to the artist and a backing band.  (For a few artists, Allmusic errors on the side of inclusion by pulling in albums that aren't billed to the artist as their primary artist but instead "feature" the artist as their guest.)

I'm against combining any artist with his/her backing band into a performing group.  (I don't mind a backing band, by itself, being a primary artist on its own.)  Unfortunately, Allmusic already has separate artist pages for solo artists like Scott Miller and for the same artist with his backing band like Scott Miller & the Commonwealth.  But the former's discography isn't pulling in a couple of the latter's albums that were released in 2003 and 2006.

5 replies

We can ask the data team to add Scott Miller as a primary artist to those two albums so they show up in his discography as well.

Zac, he's already credited as primary artist on both albums.  That's why I found it strange that both albums weren't pulled into his own page's discography.

Yeah. Strange.

If you look at the tracklisting for these two albums the songs are attributed to Scott Miller & the Commonwealth Feat. Scott Miller, but all of the other albums list the songs as being performed by both artists. Some attribute must be different in the data. We'll take a look.

Zac, his solo discography does pull in their debut album, which also has song credits that feature him.  I assume that the "feat." credit was added as an alternative to billing the album (that includes those songs) to both Scott Miller and Scott Miller & the Commonwealth.  What my problem reports, though, differs from similar situations where an artist's solo discography pulls in non-collaborative albums that feature him/her on several songs.

This is very convoluted but it has to do with inconsistencies in the data. In the database, the two albums you mention both have Scott Miller & the Commonwealth attributed as the artist at the main "Album" level. We display this album-level information wherever it is available to us.

Thus Always to Tyrants has no artist attributed at the main "Album" level so we default/fall back to the "Release" level primary artist attribute(s) and this Release contains both Scott Miller and Scott Miller & the Commonwealth.

We'll ask for this to be looked into.

Hmm, I wasn't aware that Allmusic has an album level.  My idea to solve this problem is linking Scott Miller's discography to that of Scott Miller & the Commonwealth by adding the latter as his artist page's "also known as" alias.

This is an example of an "Album" (the conceptual work, a collection of songs created by an artist): https://www.allmusic.com/album/sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-mw0000649874

This is an example of a "Release" (the physical or digital product of an album that was pressed and released on a specific date): https://www.allmusic.com/album/release/sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-50th-anniversary-edition-deluxe-version-mr0004680162

Zac, I think discography problems are created when a separate discography is given to a solo artist with his backing band (as a performing group).  All Hat No Cattle didn't credit Chris Shiflett as a Primary Artist, so it's not in his solo discography.

Phil Tanner is credited as a primary artist on this album, but his own page doesn't even have a discography.