And I just looked... "Who" has one song, so they jump ahead to tie with Led Zeppelin.
Where do people stand on ampersands in band names?
I believe Big Head Todd and the Monsters is correct, not Big Head Todd & the Monsters.
However, I do believe Crosby, Stills & Nash is correct -- not "and".
My desire would be to replace "&" with "and" every time, but I guess we can not.
I would guess we can... it's "our" db, after all. My argument is that "and" and ampersand are
equivalent, and while some artists may choose to use one or the other consistently for their
own stylistic reasons, we don't necessarily have to follow their lead, particularly if it results in
much wailing and gnashing of teeth while attempting to construct a useful database. And the
parade of people posting the set lists on the KFOG site aren't consistent either, nor do they
always conform to what the artist does.
ETA:
Crosby, Stills & Nash
Crosby, Stills, & Nash
Crosby Stills & Nash
CSN
?
maybe we should dump commas too
Well, CSN (and also CSNY, DMB, SRV, etc.) is an abbreviation and should be expanded. I regard
them as spelling errors, and change them when I notice them. (See my comments in the next
post.) As for commas, the easiest solution would be to strip them out -- again, the argument
being that we wish to minimize the rending of garments in what is supposed to be a enjoyable
enterprise. More complicated possibilities include using a special string comparison routine that
ignores punctuation, or storing both the original string for display purposes and a processed
string (i.e., with punctuation removed) for comparisons.
And then there's "Iggy Pop & Kate Pierson" vs. "Iggy Pop with Kate Pierson," and both "REM"
and "REM with Kate Pierson" are listed as performing "Shiny Happy People." (REM also does
"Shiny, Happy People" -- another reason to dump commas.)
BTW, for the non-computer people who are reading, this is the kind of niggling detail that
computer people often find themselves caught up in when attempting to write a program that
does even a relatively simple task that is easy and obvious for a human. I have read long and
involved monographs on how to account for all the possible variations in people's names, to
say nothing of street addresses. And that's just in the United States. When writing a program
for an international audience, there is a mind-boggling number of different address conventions,
telephone number formats, date and time formats, currency designations, etc. which have to
be accommodated.