Ric / MCN: The difference between artists and musicians

Within our wiki there are two distinct categories and data classes being used for sometimes (confusingly) the same thing:

• Artists –> Category:Artists
• Persons –> Category:People

Whereas the first category contains BOTH musical groups AND musical (solo) artists, the second group comprises of only individual persons. For standard band / musician formations that is easy to implement, e.g. Kaiser Kuo is a musician playing in the band Spring Autumn and hence Kaiser Kuo is categorized as a PERSON and Spring Autumn is categorized as an ARTIST.

However if one looks at e.g. Jiebing Chen one notices that two pages are being setup:

1. Jiebing Chen
2. Jiebing Chen (Artist)

It is necessary to set up two pages (that are interlinked) as both classes are storing different properties which are not the same. E.g. the INSTRUMENT that a person plays is stored on the PERSON class, whereas the YOUTUBEID with an example song is stored on the ARTIST class.

Reason behind is that (usually) a PERSON is adopting an ARTIST NAME or a STAGE PRESENCE or an IMAGINATIVE FIGURE to perform. E.g. a lot of Hongkong pop singers adopt an English name instead of their Cantonese birth name for recording and publishing music. Hence all MUSIC-related activities that are related to the STAGE NAME are being documented on the ARTIST page. All PERSON-related activities (filmography, early life, death, etc.) is documented on the PERSON page.

Folk artists not necessarily adopt a specific name for their music activities (such as Jiebing Chen above), however folk artists are often present in more than one band or project. As such the PERSON page is the more important of the two for these musicians and all their own musician activities would become documented within e.g. Jiebing Chen (Artist) or any of the project / groups / bands the musician played with.

If that gets complicated, think of COMEDIANS and how they usually have certain fixed ROLES they enact on stage. Some of these comedians release CDs or DVDs solely about one ROLE and some of them even go as far as enact that ROLE in their daily life. E.g. German comedian Hape Kerkeling has the following roles:

1. Evje van Dampen
2. Gisela
3. Günther Warnke
4. Hannilein
5. Horst Schlämmer
6. Rico Mielke
7. R.I.P. Uli
8. Siegfried Schwäbli
9. Uschi Blum
10. Wolfgang

out of which Horst Schlämmer got his own movie, own TV appearances and own cinema advertisements. Yet Horst Schlämmer is not Hape Kerkeling as it is just a stage presence created for a purpose of distributing comedy.

There is no system in the world that can truely map all the nuances and details present in human life, yet we hope that this system brings the ideal of mapping music close enough.

This is a part of our always expanding STYLEGUIDE.

Advertisement