User:Xtifr/BTAT

"Band That Allow Taping" general reorganization and categorization proposal. Suggestions and comments should go on the talk page.

Premise

"Musical acts who allow taping" or "Taper-friendly bands" is an topic of sociological and culturological interest, which deserves both a Wikipedia article and a category.

Current status

At the moment, there is only a list, List of bands which permit recordings of their performances (which I'll call "LOB"). There is a redirect at Taper-friendly bands which points to this list. (Several other redirects also point to the list.) The list is not well maintained and does not, in general, cite its references. A small handful of band/artist pages point to this list (or to one of its redirects).

There is also an article on Free music, but at the moment, it confines itself to music which is, more-or-less, equivalent to Open Source. Most "taper-friendly bands" do not meet those criteria, primarily because of the "no commercial use" restrictions that most such bands impose.

Observations

1. The LOB would be better handled as a category. (Although it may have uses on its own, at the moment it does not.)
2. There should be an article on the topic (the "TFBA") discussing and explaining the phenomenon.
3. References should be made to "musical acts", not "bands", since this phenomenon is not limited to bands, but includes many solo acts and individual performers as well.
4. "Which permit recordings of their peformances" is quite a mouthful!  :)

Proposal

I think we should do the following:

1. Decide on the appropriate nomenclature. ("taper-friendly"? "trade-friendly"? "allow recordings of their performances"?)
2. Create the TFBA, with appropriate redirects from commonly used terms like "Bands that allow taping" and "Taper-friendly bands".
3. Create an appropriately-named category and add relevant acts to this category. The category should contain a link to the TFBA.
4. Links to the LOB and TFBA should be examined and evaluated, and generally either disambiguated or removed.
5. (After the above is complete) the LOB should be re-evaluated, and possibly proposed for deletion. Alternatively, it might be repurposed somewhat, to provide information or organization that the category lacks.
6. The article on Free music should be hacked to be more general, not so "open-source-only"-ish.

Issues to debate

Actual debate should go on the talk page for now:

1. There is ongoing debate about where the boundaries of the category should be drawn, esp.
   • Artists who no longer allow taping due to policy changes, e.g. Metallica
   • Artists who no longer allow taping due to nonexistance, e.g. Grateful Dead
   • Artists who only allowed taping in retrospect, e.g. Jimi Hendrix, Warren Zevon
   • Artists who "wink at" taping, as opposed to having a formal policy.
2. The LOB contains redlinks, which may be of interest, and would be lost if the LOB were replaced with a category. These, I think would be no great loss, although perhaps a few should be mentioned in the TFBA.
3. The LOB contains (a very few) comments about specific band policies. These, I think, should be moved to band articles.

Getting started

After a couple of weeks, there hasn't been a lot of feedback. Nobody seems to be terribly excited by the notion, but nobody is objecting strenuously either. I think the best thing to do would be to start by creating the category and adding bands to it. We can see how things go from there. For that, we just need to choose a name....