Originally Posted by Janszoon

I've been enjoying Kanye West's most recent album lately, and as I usually do with albums I like, I went and read the Wikipedia entry on it. In doing so I discovered that, like his previous overblown album, this current streamlined minimalistic one also involved dozens of co-producers, co-writers and other assorted collaborators. I wasn't really surprised but it did make wonder if I'm really enjoying Kanye West here or if I'm enjoying some of the other people involved. I realize this type of massive group collaboration is common in pop music, but Kanye West isn't a Britney Spears where everyone assumes the performer isn't really the mastermind. He's definitely considered the creator of his releases, and often praised for the things he does with music.

I'm bringing that up as an example, I'm not intending to talk about him specifically. My question, about artists in general, is when are they no longer really the artist? If you didn't do the majority of the writing or performing, if your primary role was simply getting a bunch of talented people in a room together, does it make any kind of sense to give you full credit as the artist?

What do you guys think?