Adding an alias to an 'also performs as' name?

MusicBrainz Style
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I’m looking at the existing artist Emily Richards, who already has an “also performs as” relationship as Snowflake. There are releases in MB attributed to the artist “Snowflake” and I have confirmed those existing releases externally as being accurately portrayed by that artist name. However, there are also some releases which are not yet in MB which are attributed to “Madam Snowflake” on external sites and in the associated cover art for those releases.

My assumption here is that I should therefore add an alias to the existing “performs as” artist, rather than creating an additional “performs as” relationship. Is that correct? Simply put, I am anticipating having to add “Madam Snowflake” as an alias to “Snowflake” and then adding the appropriate releases under this new alias. Does that sound correct?

I have tried consulting the guidelines for aliases, and also a previous forum discussion about a similar issue, but I cannot find anything definitive for this specific situation.

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For that case, where both names seem clearly connected, I’d just add an alias, yes :slight_smile:

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Thank you for the confirmation of this. I won’t continue for long with the “may I please?” attitude for long, and I will eventually change to a more be bold attitude instead, but while I’m in my first week as an editor here I think it’s best to get a bit of direction first.

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If the artist in question currently goes by “Madam Snowflake” it may be better to actually change the artist name (Snowflake −> Madam Snowflake) rather than just add an alias. For active artists, in most cases their current name is the one we use.

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Yes, I had thought of that, but it isn’t so easy with this particular artist, as she seems to release as both Snowflake and Madam Snowflake still. Emily Richards (the artist’s legal name) is “…an admin of ccMixter.org…”, a collaborative community for creating / sharing remixes using Creative Commons licensing. She is ideally positioned to confound the efforts of a n00b music cataloguer like myself, with arcane relationships that I haven’t even begun to understand yet, haha. I’m really diving into the deep end here.

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I am not a fan of the “performs as” but there are cases it can be used - but in my opinion, is abused far more.
To me, as others have stated, this is a case for an alias. It may even be a reason to rename the artist (but I haven’t looked at it to have an opinion).

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MB isn’t Wikipedia. MB is far different, other than being “editable”.

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It was just yesterday that I canceled an edit due to conflicting information. Only to look further into the artist, and got so confused by all of the various entitites with conflicting information at numerous sources, that I quit editing for the day. My head was spinning trying to follow it all.

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