Demos and demo bands

If I'm about to add demos here, in what category should I put them? "EP"? "Other"? Or should they be added here even? I really hope so, because in some genres demos are of high importance. I saw m@x posting that Lori Linstruth may be removed from MMA because there's only one demo. Well I know nothing about that certain artist, but at least in black metal demos are often on the importance level of real full-lengths.

For example, Paysage d'Hiver has a huge fanbase although it has "just" released tape demos (that are, though, later rereleased on CD) and two splits on vinyl in low pressing amounts: http://www.metal-archives.com/band.php?id=13417. The same applies to the whole "scene" (for example, see Moonblood: http://www.metal-archives.com/band.php?id=1088) and usually demos are as important as full-lengths. If we want to build a "complete" metal source, I suggest that demo bands should NOT be removed. According to the description on the front page we strive to build a complete metal resource, and even the title has the word "archive" in it.

I just want to be sure what people think about this because, for example, in Wikipedia the Paysage d'Hiver page was deleted just because of bureaucracy: the band has "only released demos", which sounded like an insult to me.

Endless flood of bands might become a problem, and the line between bands that should be added and those who sould not be added is hard to make.

An idea that I have had is to look how many listeners artists have in, say, Last.fm. That would remove all such demo bands that don't have a real fanbase, but would keep those bands here who have a decent fanbase (though still having released only demos). Just an idea.

Edit: To continue with Paysage d'Hiver, the band has 7,448 listeners in Last.fm, which is quite prominent. Just saying that I don't want this to end up like Wikipedia... :-)

Edited by Vehemency - 29 Mar 2010 at 5:16am