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  #1  
Old Mar 21, 2011, 06:07 AM
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Dag Dag is offline
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Since this is a company and not a real unit I don't think we should link to it.
This is just Bamco crediting themselves (as the copyright holders) in the place of the composers. Similarly they often use "NAMCO (person x)", "NBGI (x)" or just "NBGI" in many of their albums.

Sakuraba and Tamura are freelance after all and not part of Tales Studio, I think this mimics the Mikanuchi Engineering / Kinuyo Yamashita situation.
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  #2  
Old Mar 21, 2011, 06:30 AM
Cedille Cedille is offline
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Quote:
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Sakuraba and Tamura are freelance after all and not part of Tales Studio, I think this mimics the Mikanuchi Engineering / Kinuyo Yamashita situation.
Nope, Tamura used to be a contract worker of them and thus was part of the company (he left last year though).

Also, you mean like, we shouldn't do like "Mikanuchi Engineering (Kinuyo Yamashita)" for Rockman album? I thought this was the intended usage of unit linking based on my understanding of this discussion. I think one of the points of unit linking is to handle a case where a unit is credited, yet we somehow know the breakdown, like this case.

Anyways, I'm sorry if it's premature or wrong.
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  #3  
Old Mar 21, 2011, 06:53 AM
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Units should refer to a sound unit / studio or artist group rather than a company, ideally. Although we could give some leeway for cases where companies are the only known credit.
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Old Mar 21, 2011, 07:22 AM
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What I don't see is why Tales Studio couldn't be considered as a unit, while Konami Kukeiha Club, Falcom sound team jdk or Shinsekai Gakkyoku Zatsugidan can. The only difference I can see is the lack of the dedicated name given to those companies' sound sections, but otherwise, they aren't less generic than Namco Tales Studio is, as seen in Konami Industry Co.,Ltd. being already taken as a variation of Konami Kukeiha Club by us.

More than that, in some Tales albums, it's only Namco Tales Studio which is actually listed as the composer and were supposed to be credited by us, if we didn't check the staff rolls or such to get the indivisual names, so the situation isn't really different than this album, where now both the unit and the indivisual composers are credited. The sole difference is that Falcom gave its sound team a name.

For what it's worth though, I don't think every company needs its entry, especially if there is no album to link, compared to a more music-specific group. I think I originally made this entry because there was nobody but Tales Studio to credit.
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Old Mar 21, 2011, 07:47 AM
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I don't have a problem with companies as units. If a bunch of albums credit "Namco Tales Studio", then I think it merits an entry. Think of it as referring to the company's music creation team rather than the company itself.
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  #6  
Old Mar 21, 2011, 11:27 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cedille View Post
Nope, Tamura used to be a contract worker of them and thus was part of the company (he left last year though).
My understanding has always been that both Tamura and Sakuraba are contracted to do the music work on a project base, making them de facto employees of NTS at least for a limited time for each project and resulting in the respective crediting scheme. Tamura may have been employed more "permanently" before, but he also always did other works not related to NST at all. This is different from the nowadays more usual approach to pay freelance composers by tracks, by minutes of composed/arranged music and the likes (and leading to a different approach to creating the music itself directly affecting its quality/quantity balance depending on the budget allocated for those posts).

Of course I may as well totally off there but noone of my insider contacts (I unfortunately can't quote publicly) indicated so so far.
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  #7  
Old Mar 22, 2011, 01:32 AM
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Well, I think it's strange to credit a company, who isn't really an "artist".
The way I see it, Konami Kukeiha Club, Falcom jdk, etc, are like a named "band" with "members" (like, say, Rolling Stones + Mick Jagger).
Namco Tales Studio and co are companies that pay bands+people to create music (like Warner Music, I guess). They don't 'make' the music so creditting them seems weird.

If others agree to credit them it's ok, but keep in mind this may affect many albums, especially Namco's.
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  #8  
Old Mar 22, 2011, 02:45 AM
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Companies often have sound staffs. Some sometimes give names to their sound staffs and others don't. In most cases you won't see those "bands" performing independently from the parent company so making a different between a named and an unnamed group of sound members seems arbitrary. In both cases the ideal way is to get detailed credits anyway, both "bands" and sound staffs are only fall backs at best.

Last edited by Datschge; Mar 22, 2011 at 02:51 AM.
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  #9  
Old Mar 22, 2011, 04:04 AM
Cedille Cedille is offline
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For me, it sounds more weird to treat some in-house sound teams differently, just because they aren't officially called by a unique name (e.g. Zuntata) or specified (e.g. Nintendo Sound Team, not Nintendo). It's just a matter of their companies not naming their teams, and it doesn't have something to do directly with whether they are actually units or not.

Also, I believe (hope!) I'm not saying something very alien to us that immediately affects other submissions, because we've been already added several game companies as units (NBGI, CHUNSOFT, Hudson Soft, Alice Soft and more) and for that matter, even those with the named sound teams have some albums with the company credits, and they were just treated as variations (granted, this was for the most part because it was later where they started to name their teams, but Sega nowadays still sometimes credits artists as simply "Sega", even though they previously used "Sega Sound Team" before)

Konami Kukeiha Club <-> Konami Industry Co.,Ltd.
Falcom Sound Team jdk <-> Nihon Falcom  
Sega Sound Team <-> SEGA
Irem Sound Team <-> IREM SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INC.

That being said, I do understand why some members might feel odd and want to alert the addition of game companies. I don't summarize my mind yet, but there must be cases where we shouldn't credit them, for certain, and we should make a consensus though a further discussion. As for this case, though, I still it's fine, since we have this amount of albums where Namco Tales Studio are primarily credited (note that I leave Hearts, Narikiri Dungeon X, VS., Destiny Remake, Radiant Mythology 2 and more), but I'll keep listening to how others think, since I know it's not just splitting hairs.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Datschge View Post
My understanding has always been that both Tamura and Sakuraba are contracted to do the music work on a project base, making them de facto employees of NTS at least for a limited time for each project and resulting in the respective crediting scheme. Tamura may have been employed more "permanently" before, but he also always did other works not related to NST at all..
Yeah, that can explain why Sakuraba lives miles away and wouldn't even go to the office that much, yet is listed as part of the studio so often, but I assume the situation between Sakuraba and Tamura can be different. I couldn't salvage the profile page from his shitty old site, but he called himself as 契約社員 (a contracted employee, don't know what it equals outside of Japan, but it's just a worker with the limited period, as you say), and I assume he was asked not to work with any other 'game' companies, but was allowed to compose stuff like mainstream music.
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  #10  
Old Mar 22, 2011, 04:18 AM
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For me, crediting companies is suspiciously close to a catch-all like "Various Artists" (although crediting sound teams isn't much better). But of course, if that's the official credit on the booklet / staff roll / website, etc, by all means credit the company as a unit.

A related issue is the necessity of creating entries with the same company name in both artist and organization tables, since we can't link organizations to artist roles. Although I can't think of any real reason stopping us from doing that, either...
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  #11  
Old Mar 22, 2011, 01:27 PM
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Ok, I understand.
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