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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