Hello, i came across the artist page for Budd Dwyer which I wrongly assumed was for the producer alias of $crim, one half of the $uicideboy$ but it is not. This page has been used for production credits for $uicideboy$ releases for years but it was originally created for a grindcore band from New Jersey by the same name.
The disambiguation and external links made me think this was the correct artist to credit, and now there’s 6 pages worth of edits most of which are as production credits for the $uicideboy$.
Seeing as most edits on the page, and the external link relationships all point to the $b’s “Budd Dwyer” im wondering what the correct course of action is: make a new page for the grindcore Budd Dwyer and move the only release to it, or make a new artist page for $b’s Budd Dwyer and manually move all production credits to it
As long as the final result is the artists being separated, I don’t see a problem with either way. I would choose the easiest option myself, then add disambiguations to both to (hopefully) prevent confusion in the future.
No one will shoot you for picking the easiest route. Especially as this is also means the majority of MB records don’t need to change. It is the route of least disruption.
I just did something similar with McCartney’s Frog Chorus as it was tangled up with the Muppets Frog Chorus… ( The Frog Chorus - MusicBrainz ) Still an edit in progress. Technically the Muppets were created first, but way more McCartney links exists. So moving the Muppets to a new artist means least disruption to the database.
I’d like to use this thread to issue a plea to (pretty much) always add disambiguations when adding new artists, and to also add disambiguations to any existing disambiguation-less artists that you come across while adding a new artist with the same name.
Without fail, if there are a set of artists like this:
Some Guys (NYC punk band)
Some Guys (Congolese hip-hop trio)
Some Guys
Some Guys (Micronesian polka octet)
Some Guys (German Vocaloid collective)
, a bunch of unrelated “feat. Some Guys” and various-artists credits will get dumped into the third, disambiguation-less artist. Every time.
And if you can’t figure out which artist a credit should be assigned to, it’s better to create a new artist with a disambiguation like “feat. on ‘Some Song’ by Some Artist”. It’s far easier for someone to merge that artist in the future than it is for them to try to reassign incorrect credits, especially when they’re duplicated across a bunch of releases.