Pursuant to the "Capital Punishment" rule and this thread:

http://bandtoband.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3387

I just noticed MrP. has aliased "Charlie Parker And His Orchestra" as "Charlie Parker and his orchestra" for this release:

http://bandtoband.com/index.php?Page=Search&AlbumId=19364

That doesn't look like an "alternate capitalization scheme" to me. It's "downstyle" (all lowercase) except of course "Charlie Parker" is capitalized as a proper name. Do we need to be even more explicit about which capitalization schemes count as standard and which count as alternate? "Lowercase + proper names capitalized" seems pretty standard to me.

I guess I'm also confused now whether the capitalization rule applies not only to a band's primary name but also to any possible aliases based on cover art. I had assumed the rule covers aliases too, since for instance we don't alias "The Beatles" as "the beatles" on these releases:

http://bandtoband.com/index.php?Page=Search&AlbumId=6791
http://bandtoband.com/index.php?Page=Search&AlbumId=13782

Sorry bgz. Didn't mean to cause a fuss - I just stumbled across that Charlie Parker. My reading of the current rules for band names is:
1) 'All In Standard Capitals' goes in as 'All In Standard Capitals'
2) 'all in lower case' goes in as 'All In Lower Case'
3) 'ALL IN CAPS' goes in as 'All In Caps'
4) 'Chicago Manual of Style' goes in as 'Chicago Manual of Style'. This is because we only have one standard form and that's #1 in this example
5) 'AnY Non-STandard FOrM' goes in as 'AnY Non-STandard FOrM'

That's just my take and I guess apart from #4 not that contentious.

Not sure how you're reading the rule...

"The use of all capital letters, all lower case letters, or headline style does not constitute an alternate capitalization scheme and the band names are formatted according to the first Rule presented here."

"Chicago Manual of Style" = headline style, so it goes in as "Chicago Manual Of Style".

And "Charlie Parker and his orchestra" is, I would argue, just another standard form (lowercase except for proper nouns), so it can go in as "Charlie Parker And His Orchestra" without an alias indicating non-standardness.

In other words, all standards are brought into line with our one standard.

I never saw that bit about headline style before and - until you educated me - wouldn't have known it had a technical meaning in any case (if indeed it does always refer to the specific style). I stand corrected.

I think the "headline style" thing is a recent change to the rule, so that would explain why you hadn't seen it before. But getting back to "Charlie Parker and his orchestra" -- are you still sticking to your guns on that?

No. Can someone amend it? The whole issue is slightly losing me and your reading - while not necessarily, it seems to me, entirely at one with the rules - is more at one with common sense.

OK, alias removed, with a link to this thread in the notes.

I apologize for all this confusion, some of which arose because Kevin and I met and updated the rules before I could respond to all the posts.

Under Capital Punishment, band names are standardized, following The "The" rules, this way:

1) 'All In Standard Capitals' goes in as 'All In Standard Capitals'
2) 'all in lower case' goes in as 'All In Lower Case'
3) 'ALL IN CAPS' goes in as 'All In Caps'
4) 'Chicago Manual of Style or Headline Style' goes in as 'Chicago Manual Of Style Or Headline Style'.
5) 'AnY Non-STandard FOrM' goes in as 'AnY Non-STandard FOrM'

Band name aliasing should be limited to just these situations:

1) trivial name changes
2) punctuation
3) diacritics

This means that Charlie Parker And His Orchestra is correct as is. Please let me know if any of this isn't clear, and thanks, as always, for ensuring that b2b is always covering all of its bases.

On that last bit about aliasing:

A band in the DB and queue released several albums early in their career as "DC Talk" and several more, later, as "dc Talk". In both cases they were very consistent about usage inside the liner notes, on websites, etc., and this really represented a one-time name change rather than simple inconsistent capitalization.

As a result, I put them in the DB as "DC Talk" and their later albums in my queue as "DC Talk||dc Talk", assuming we considered the capitalization change a "trivial name change". But now that I reread the rules I don't notice capitalization in the list of "changes considered trivial", so I'm not sure I was supposed to alias it (even though it seems like a perfect use of that field). Did I do the right thing?

(If I did the wrong thing, then I need to go fix Firehouse, where I've already modified the live albums to reflect per-album band name capitalization via the alias field.)

Along with the cases Mark mentioned, band aliases are only to be used where band names / formatting would have been honored had they not been lost to a The "The" Ruling.

1) "dc Talk" would have been honored so they can have the alias.
2) "Charlie Parker and his orchestra" would not have been honored so they don't get an alias.

Another way to think about it would be, if the album at hand were the only album in the system for the band in question, how would the band name appear? If this does not match how the band is standardized in the system, then add the alias.


Kevin

Thanks, that last paragraph is very clear.

OK, alias removed, with a link to this thread in the notes.

Usually I never comment on blogs but your article is so convincing that I never stop myself to say something about it. You’re doing a great job Man,Keep it up.