What's the difference between "Wings" and "Paul McCartney & Wings"?

File under: Ex Beatle solo career ideas
Section 1: What will I name myself?.

 

Guess I don't hear a "band sound" from Wings - and it seems hard to pin down a "band sound" with them because the members changed so often!

No single iteration lasted more than 2-3 years!

 

I file both under "Beatles."

 

Red Rose Speedway and Band On The Run are officially Paul McCartney and Wings releases.

 

This is the same thread

 

100+ replies! Wow, you can always count on getting a lot of attention when you start a thread that is in some ways Beatles-related.
I want to thank you all for the help, but I'm still not sure how I should do. For now, I've decided to sort everything that has to do with Wings as Wings, not Paul McCartney & Wings or any such thing. "Ram" is Paul & Linda McCartney, all the other stuff (including Fireman) is Paul McCartney.

 

no difference, but maybe the members liked seeing"Wings" better...

 

Wrong link, there's two.

 

Of course Paul was the leader, as Jeff Lynne was in ELO.

 

I file them with the rest of my Denny Laine lps

 

I've filed everything as Paul McCartney & Wings. Until recently the only song I had of them was Live And Let Die and that one was filed as Paul McCartney & Wings. So when I got a bunch of other songs (the free downloads from Paul McCartney's site) I also filed them as Paul McCartney & Wings to be consistent. Last.fm also does not provide a clear outcome as both Paul McCartney & Wings and Wings are about evenly popular. So I stuck with the name I already had in my library instead of changing everything.

 

Since Paul wanted it to be Wings, and only allegedly used PM&W under corporate pressure, the case is pretty strong that everything from the 70's goes in "Wings"

But every single one of us has them all under "M"

 

Well, if you name the file (or rather, the artist tag in the file) Wings then it automatically gets sorted under the W. With Paul McCartney & Wings it gets sorted under P (and just under/above Paul McCartney).

 

mccartney gets a bigger cut when his name is in front?

 

In my case, it's vinyl and CDs. They are under "M". Can't miss it, with Wings Over America stuck in there.

 

Not me!

 

They got merged but abzach's comments remained...

 

The apostrophe is a typo.

I think the addition of "Paul McCartney and" was a marketing decision imposed on the band. Sales and reviews of early Wings records were disappointing (particularly by unreachable Beatles standards), and I think that some folks blamed this slump on the lack of public awareness that this was Paul's group, rather than on any properties inherent in the recordings themselves. (Strangely, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" never seems to show up on "Best of" compilations, even multi-disc affairs like "Pure McCartney.")

 

I see nothing strange about leaving “Mary Had a Little Lamb” off of “Best of” collections.

YMMV, of course.

 

But the original poster specifically asked his digital music library. So what one does with their vinyl and CDs is not relevant.

 

Technically, so is 'Rock Show.' How do you justify the live album from the tour being one band name and the live video from the same tour being another?

Me, I'd rather file the three PM&W albums under W than file the seven Wings albums under M. They started as Wings and ended as Wings. The couple of variations in the middle are just an anomaly.

This annoying headache, of course, could all have been avoided if they'd just marketed RRS and BOTR as "Wings featuring Paul McCartney."

 

Me either. I filed them under W back in the mid-70s and I'm far too lazy and unmotivated to make the effort to move them over now.

 

It can be hard to convey irony in written form, but be assured I do not lament "Lamb's" omission from compilations - even though it was a bona fide charting hit single.

Briefly and unironically: I think McCartney's name was added to Wings in 1972-74 for commercial reasons, but a quick review of the earliest Wings material shows that (1) McCartney's presence was quite evident and (2) poor sales and reviews may have resulted from the general perception of the quality of the material rather than lack of public awareness of who was in the band. In my opinion, Paul was trying so hard not to be a Beatle that he intentionally avoided many of the musical attributes that made the Beatles so popular in the first place. Personally, I never buy an album because it's Paul - I buy Paul's albums when I like what's on them, so as a result I have a substantial but incomplete collection of his post-Beatles work.

 

I wonder how he would've handled John Cougar/John Cougar Mellecamp/John Mellencamp lol

 

Venus and Mars was just Wings as was Wildlife, Wings at the Speed of Sound, London Town and Back To The Egg.
I'm not agreeing with what and why Red Rose Speedway and Band on the Run are labeled as originally, I'm just sayin they were released as Paul McCartney and Wings for commercial reasons.