@Hankpropaniac57: You're right that all of those issues are big...

Hankpropaniac57
2024-02-17T20:07:42-05:00

You're right that all of those issues are big headaches. I do have some ideas, at least.

magcolo said:

[...]

0. Some artists have more than one alias, or has performed both as an solo artist and in a group [...]

PowaPowa-P comes up as an example of someone who's essentially known by two names. Some English-language sites still use PowaPowa-P, while a lot of Japanese sources (official re-uploads by his label, Wikipedia, his Twitter, etc.) use siinamota. My first instinct is to use the most up-to-date name available. Meaning siinamota's songs would have a consistent qualifier, even if some of them were made when he went by a different name. That could cause issues in the future when an artist decides to change their name, but would be better than having tags with inconsistently named qualifiers because an artist changed their name halfway through their career.

At the same time, does that apply to producers like Hachi/Yonezu Kenshi, who marked a separation in his Vocaloid and non-Vocaloid music by starting to use his real name? The answer would probably depend on whether someone wanted to see Kick Back art alongside Matryoshka art when looking up *_(yonezu_kenshi). I personally wouldn't, and think that it would be beneficial to have a Vocaloid/non-Vocaloid split. So except in those cases, I would rather we use their most recent name.

As for solo vs. group projects, it'd make sense to qualify solo work with the solo artist and group work with the group. But do you have any examples that would make qualifying like this difficult? I can't think of any off the top of my head.

1. Songs that are collaborations between multiple producers? (e.g. Star Night Snow as SimpleName mentioned) [...]

Collaboration songs are also a bit awkward, but have a more immediate solution, which is to include multiple names in the tag. That would allow one to keep the ability to do wildcard searches for music a producer is involved in (ex. star_night_snow_(orangestar/n-buna) would be picked up by both an *orangestar* and *n-buna* search). However, that changes the search and could lead to false positives (there are currently two artist tags with "orangestar" in their names). It is still doable, but awkward. And then if there's fanart for a song with, say, 10 producers on it, that would get messy very quickly.

2. Songs that are commercially commissioned? (e.g. love live!, #compass, project sekai, magical mirai and countless anime OPEDs) [...]

Project Voltage is another example. Do these songs belong to the projects or the producers? I'm unsure whether events like Magical Mirai should count, because I don't think anyone would say Dappou Rock is more of a Magical Mirai song than it is a Neru song. But then there's songs for things like Project Sekai, which are more associated with the game (from what I understand, at least). I see two options, either using the artist name as a qualifier as proposed, or using the project name as a qualifier. It would depend on which is more valuable, being able to group together every song a producer has ever written for anything, or being able to group together image songs for specific copyrights. I would tentatively say the latter is more important and that the project should be used as the qualifier for commercially produced songs. But this requires some more discussion, because it would re-introduce some inconsistency.

3. Songs featuring a well-known human singer? (e.g. topic #25915)
4. Old anime songs that are currently gentags? (e.g. don't say "lazy", god knows...)

Honestly, I don't know what to do about utaite originals and old anime songs. Old anime songs could be qualified with the anime if need be, maybe. Utaite originals are out of my depth, but if I were to compare it to Vocaloid tagging, using the singer as a qualifier would be like making a song tag called "world_is_mine_(hatsune_miku)". Those song tags may also benefit from having artist qualifiers.

I'm not 100% confident in the solutions I did propose, but hopefully changing the qualifier to prioritize the artist in general would bring more positives than the current system.