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About the Format
Artists are grouped together into HTML pages by the first two letters
of the artist name. I'm open to suggestions on how to do this
differently, but I figured that was the best compromise between a
single HTML file for each artist (there are more than 2000 in the
database) and a single file for each letter of the alphabet (Loading
"S" would take forever).
In the main compilations section, entries are grouped together
only by the first letter of the compilation's title. There isn't
nearly as much compilation data as there is artist data, so this
should be reasonable for now.
Although not every artist has information listed for each of these
sections, each one can contain the following:
Releases
This is the main discography for the artist, including singles, EPs, and
full-lengths of all media types. I generally shy away from including
cassettes here, mostly because I don't buy very many of them. Because
of the database implementation, there can only be one label and one
year listed for each item, so what you see is the original label and
year of first release. If it's really important to include a re-release
on a different label, I'll either list it as a separate item or just
mention that information in the description.
Discographies are sorted by year of release. It looks like releases
that don't have a year listed automatically appear at the top of
the list.
As far as these discographies go, I'm not really concerned with
extreme completeness. This is especially true for bands that already
have extensive home pages with discographical information. If someone
has already gone to the trouble of compiling and maintaining that kind
of data,
I'd much rather just point to it without trying to duplicate anyone
else's efforts. In fact, you may see some artists here with no
releases listed at all, just a reference to somebody else's page.
Compilations
These are releases which include tracks by the given
artist as well as other artists. Note that this also includes split releases
between only two groups. Each compilation entry is itself a link, so you
can jump directly to the track listing for the entire compilation. And in
that listing, each artist is a link, so you can look up information about
the other bands on that same record.
Description
This is intended to be a concise history of the artist
with comments about the major releases in the discography. The idea here is
not to provide a comprehensive history, but rather an introduction to someone
who might not have heard of this artist before. If you've seen books like the
Trouser Press, Rolling Stone, or even Cleopatra's
Industrial Revolution guides, you'll get an idea of what I'd like
to have there. I'd like this database to be more than just a reference,
but also something you can just read through to find out more
about bands.
So that's the theory. At the moment, though, the artist descriptions
are the biggest missing piece of
the whole database. A majority of the artists don't have any description
written at all, and many of them are "borrowed" from reviews and label
sleeves. My hope is that people like you will be interested in helping
out with this. See the
How You Can Help
page for more information.
Here are a couple of examples that may give you an idea of what a useful
description looks like:
See Also
These are links to other related artists within the database.
When two artists are linked together, it usually means that they both have
individual members in common. When somebody just does production or other
assistance on somebody else's records, I don't count that as a real link,
although I may note that information in the description of either or both
artists.
Other Links
These are simply links to other Web resources outside of
this site, including home pages, ftp sites, and even some e-mail addresses.
Ed Klein
eklein@kzsu.stanford.edu