Artist aliases implementation

[Darkloke]

Greetings.

I would like to start a thread (again?) about artists and their aliases and how they stored in MB. I suppose this could be interesting only for developers (@reosarevok ), but anyway.

So far (as i understand) artists aliases in MB stored in 2 ways:

• As separate artist if its known that he “performs as”
• As text in “aliases” field

Looking upon https://iswcnet.cisac.org/ i noticed that if an artist has several aliases then usually he has appropriate IPIs assigned to them. Here is an example:

Iain Roberton

ROBERTON IAIN - 00511810200
DEXTER MIKE - 00613874735
BALEY ELIJAH - 00714584340
ZUNDER ULRICH - 00650869518
ROBERTON GARETH IAIN MCCULLOCH - 00511805486

So what if to store aliases in “master-detail” relationship? I mean we have a physical person who has “virtual” nicknames. So artist real name will be “master” field, while all aliases - “detail” fields. Also every alias could store its assigned IPI.

Also i suppose this could gives two “bonuses”:

• On tracklist in “artist as credited” field you can choose one of his known/stored aliases instead filling custom text by yourself
• We can store all works on “master” artist field, which would reflect phisical person, while virtual aliases would reflect how an artist credited on tracklist/recording level

I think that such topic probably already discussed in the past and the current MB scheme is justified by time and other reasons, but but but… just tell me what do you think please.

And just another question… Is there any way to use artist real/phisical name as default credit in Picard? Often there is an arguable situation where an artist default name should be his real name or an alias. Or should be his real name be full or shortened? I suppose this could be avoided if we could have another field for artist full real name and the Picard option to use it for artist credits.

[jesus2099]

If you search IPI in the forum, there was discussions showing the IPI are not distributed uniquely worldwide and you cannot just think there is only one per artist name, strictly.

So don’t worry too much about them, you can just list them all.

Artists with multiple IPI numbers

I’ve seen many times cases where different IPIs are assigned to variants of a name like Name Surname vs. N. Surname (which seem non-intentional and just a mess). For cases where the choice of separate IPIs seems intentional, I’d list the info in the annotation for now.

Trust BMI, or http://iswcnet.cisac.org/

I’ve seen this happen myself. I have even seen ISWC have the same work listed more than once when BMI/ASCAP does not. There is no one simple answer because there are different reasons why we may get different results. To answer the first question, I find BMI and ASCAP easier to work with - user friendlier. So that is where I would go. Especially considering that they are the originators of the data. The second question is, again, one of those different reasons/results kind of questions. In g…

https://community.metabrainz.org/tag/ipi

[justcheckingitout]

@Darkloke

So far (as i understand) artists aliases in MB stored in 2 ways:

• As separate artist if its known that he “performs as”
• As text in “aliases” field

Just to cover all bases, there is also ‘credited as’.