Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/120 Greatest Musical Masterpieces


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Deor (talk) 12:47, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

120 Greatest Musical Masterpieces

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Non-notable album. –Chase (talk / contribs) 01:55, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Albums and songs-related deletion discussions.  Everymorning   talk  04:17, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of England-related deletion discussions. NorthAmerica1000 12:44, 27 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep: This is an example of (if not the very first) classical music compilation album of many (120) "great masterpieces". The advert is also considered notable and has been posted on YouTube (twice) with over 30,000 views. As it is not a recording of a performance, and dates to the 1970s it is unreasonable to expect critical reviews on the web. However, it was an important source to show what orchestral pieces were considered popular (or the "greatest") and even today the track list is a useful source of information about what can be considered popular.  Where else can you find such information!
 * This delete proposal may be in error, and it is also being proposes that the companion 30 Great Piano Classics album be merged with this article. It seems to me that this delete proposal is just a ploy to force a compromise, whereas I feel that if the albums have different numbers, covers, subject matter and titles, then they are different.  Surrey John    (Talk) 10:26, 29 December 2014 (UTC)
 * The album's importance should be demonstrated in reliable secondary sources, not original research. –Chase (talk / contribs) 20:01, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
 * Delete there were plenty of orchestral classical music compilations released over time, both before and after this; most are not notable. The quality of the individual pieces does not provide notability to the whole. WP:NOTINHERIT. I found no mention of this compilation in the couple of classical music magazines from 1978 that I looked at. Fails to have significant coverage in reliable sources, fails WP:NALBUM. --Bejnar (talk) 11:37, 29 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment', you seem to be confused and that is partially my fault. The merge discussion reached no consensus, so I referred it to AfD, but forgot to remove the merge tag too. It also seems that the nominator in this AfD had no involvement in that merge discussion, and I, who started the merge discussion, have had no involvement in this article's AfD. To conclude, you have no reason to assume bad faith here, there are no ploys. I believe you are aware that the other article is at AfD and have already commented there. Boleyn (talk) 20:26, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, NorthAmerica1000 06:28, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete. I don't see evidence here that this album is considered notable under WP:NALBUMS. Of the three sources cited, one is a discography page at the Discogs.com database, one is a TV commercial for the album, and the third is about a different classical compilation mentioned in the article. No sources have been provided to describe the album's notability in terms of sales or critical response (favorable or unfavorable). --Metropolitan90 (talk) 06:35, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete I agree with the nominator and Metropolitan90. -- Star cheers peaks news lost wars Talk to me 23:01, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment: It's not the album which is notable. There is no new recording, no credited orchestra or conductor. The albums comprise small ~1 min clips so there is no performance to review. Also as mail-order there are no sales ranking. What is important about this article is the listing of 150 great (and notable) works of classical music, and the obvious educational content. Anyone wanting to discover classical music could use this list as a starting point. There is so special claims about the music here, so nothing here which isn't verifiable. We cant simply write an article listing what is great (as that bias), so instead we need to rely on purely factual articles such as this  Surrey John    (Talk) 18:59, 7 January 2015 (UTC)
 * "Wikipedia is not the place to seek publicity for a cause, product, individual, ideology, etc." –Chase (talk / contribs) 13:24, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
 * First of all, a mail-order album is eligible to be certified gold or platinum if its sales so warrant; the RIAA certification rules specifically say that "Product shipped to retail, mail order, record clubs, TV marketing and other ancillary markets are combined toward certified sales." That said, recordings will only be certified if the record company pays the fee to have the recording's sales audited by the RIAA, and I can understand why a small record company might decline to do so for a compilation album with no principal conductor whose reputation could be boosted by receiving a gold record. Second, I don't think we can say that the track listing is useful because it identifies 150 great and notable classical compositions; the problem is that the list comes from no particular authority. We don't know who chose the 120 or 150 recordings for this album, but it probably was not a prominent figure in the classical music world or they would have been identified on the album and in marketing. For comparison, see List of important operas; nine publications were used by Wikipedians to select the "important" operas in the opera corpus, but those lists were "created by recognized authorities in the field of opera", not compiled by some unidentified person. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:23, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Dont forget about the notability of the TV advertising: "Outside his film career, Williams gained fame as the star of a television commercial for 120 Music Masterpieces, a four-LP set of classical music excerpts from Columbia Records. This became the longest-running nationally seen commercial in U.S. television history, for 13 years from 1971 to 1984. It began, "I'm sure you recognise this lovely melody as 'Stranger in Paradise.' But did you know that the original theme is from the Polovetsian Dance No. 2 by Borodin?. So many of the tunes of our well-known popular songs were actually written by the great masters--like these familiar themes... " see . The commercial was so familiar in the US that it was spoofed by Charles Rocket on Saturday Night Live. Surely this album should be worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, even if it doesn't 'fit' as a notable Classical or Pop album, its notable in other ways!  Surrey John    (Talk) 15:04, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Upon further consideration, I believe that it may be possible to establish this album as notable (based on sales and/or attention paid to its commercial), although I don't think the current article does enough to do that. Perhaps the page should be userfied so the article creator can work on it some more. There are still some basic facts in doubt, such as whether the original title of this album was 120 Greatest Musical Masterpieces or 120 Music Masterpieces, and whether the original record label was Columbia or Dacrop. (It might have been released by different labels over the years under different titles.) Furthermore, the article says the album was released in 1978, but the quote above says the TV commercial began airing in 1971. These facts should be established with reference to reliable sources. Also, I am not sure why there is a quote from Worldheritage.org above; that's just a mirror of Wikipedia, and the same content appears here on Wikipedia in our John Williams (actor) article. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 02:12, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
 * Administrative Note. I just closed the related Articles for deletion/30 Great Piano Classics, as delete, but with an offer to draftify if somebody wants to work on continuing to research sources.  Should this get closed as delete, I suggest the same offer to draftify be made here (but I'm not actually offering any opinion on which way the close should go).  -- RoySmith (talk) 17:05, 11 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Rewritten This article has now been rewritten to include the U.S. album release, so now covering 14 years, 4 albums, the notable TV commercial and John Williams. Others are welcome to contribute. I believe this now deserves a re-vote!  Surrey John    (Talk) 12:41, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, slakr  \ talk / 20:59, 12 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete - There is no evidence that this compilation album meets notability. It is not demonstrated by any of the references in the article, nor could I find any evidence in my own searches. -- Whpq (talk) 22:29, 18 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Edited Unfortunately some important detail recently got deleted. I have restored the information about longest running TV advert (with a better source) and also added a reference to the spoof "Steve Martin's Best Show Ever (1981)". The fact the TV ad (for the albums) was spoofed on network TV also shows notoriety!  Surrey John    (Talk) 12:34, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment - I fail to see any sort of important detail there. The longest running TV ad isn't an aeertion of notability, and is sourced to the trivia section of IMDB which is an unreliable source.  The assertion that the Steve Martin sketch is a spoof of the commercial is quite a stretch, and providing the original source really strays into original research as it really represent your interpretation of the material -- Whpq (talk) 22:08, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete This is certainly not the "very first" such compilation: this one predates it by ten years. The Great Musicians series was published by Fabbri and Partners in the late 1960s (1966 in Italy, 1969 in London). Popularizing compilations of classical music aren't unusual. This is no special case, and I think we should apply the standard criteria for such compilations. The sourcing is poor. All the Google hits are sales pages except the duckduckgo one, which is a copy of part of this Wikipedia article. The "electronically rechannelled for stereo" statement fails verification in FN1 and FN2. It's in FN3, actually, but it was SurreyJohn who put it there, so self-published. So it was advertised by John Williams and that's on YouTube, as is a "spoof" (if it is a spoof; all I get is a short quote of an observation that is anyway made quite often, and much mockery of Bartok. Isn't it WP:OR to call this a spoof of the ad?) I'm not seeing anything notable here. --Stfg (talk) 22:31, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete No secondary sources that provide evidence of notability. PianoDan (talk) 15:52, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.