“In some cases, a person (or, more rarely, a group) can perform under multiple names that they actually consider different projects, and not just alternative names. In that case, you should add each artist separately. If they’re a person, a separate legal name artist should be added, and linked to all performance names with the is person (“performs as”) relationship. In this case, do not add legal name aliases to the performance names. For groups, just link each group to their members.”
Onelinedrawing is definitely a specific project as opposed to work under his full name. This is how it is any other music collection. For instance on Last.fm they are separate.
So, two questions:
Do I need to have a conversation about this somewhere before editing?
And how do I do such an action? I would assume it requires multiple edits.
If you start putting through edits, other editors can vote and comment, so the conversation is usually held in the edit notes. People who’ve subscribed to the artist will be notified of your edits, so they’ll be aware of what you’re trying to do.
To my knowledge, yes, it’s going to take a lot of edits… Starting with each release you have to change the artist to the new artist, make sure it’s changed for every track, and the release group, and the recordings, and then do that for each album… It’s much easier to merge than to split artists unfortunately :S
Maybe someone else has a quicker way to do it that I’m not aware of!
One thing though, I’m not convinced that they should be split!
You haven’t provided that much evidence of it being a seperate project. It seems like he interchangeably used the different names and his musical style hasn’t varied that much (or at all?) between the two. According to Wikipedia he ‘retired the onelinedrawing moniker in 2004 and now intends to put all future solo releases under his name’. Since he’s ‘swapping out’ the names, it doesn’t seem like they’re distinct from each other. If he was performing under both names at once, and each sounded very different, that would seem more like different artists to me.
Last.fm unfortunately is a very bad example, they simply lack the functionality to deal with artist name variations.
MB does have this functionality, so when you tag using the current un-split artist, you will still get the correct relevant alias tagged into each release (so it will be scrobbled under the appropriate name for each track, for instance). So on a practical/ tagging level you shouldn’t have to worry too much
On top of what @aerozol said, in cases like this it can help to look at the edit history. In this case, the artist One Line Drawing has been merged into Jonah Matranga twice already, here and here.
Before you go ahead with your proposed edits, maybe comment on the more recent merge if you have questions, or at least consider the arguments presented.
You know, I think even editors who are aware of it can forget to check the edit history (speaking for myself, anyway!). It’s not really in a place that catches your attention. There was discussion in another post of being alerted if you’re duplicating an open edit, but it seems like it would also be useful if editors could be alerted of previous edits, especially ones that were down voted, that were the same or very similar to new ones they’re making (sort of like how this board presents similar posts as you’re writing a new one).
I realize the logistics of this are probably prohibitive for now…
Thanks, all, for the quick and helpful response. Still new and didn’t know about the history (and lots of things). It definitely helps see what is going on and why.
Really my only concern is that I would like the old releases to show up under the old name in my collection as that is what I know them as and what they were released under. I think it will do this though not sure yet; I was using Beets and the artists showed up as the new name, so I just skipped it and starting digging around.
You’ve linked to the artist page, not the release
If a release is incorrectly credited as ‘Jonah Matranga’ when it should be ‘onelinedrawing’, you can edit the release to still be on that artist page, but tag files correctly, by using the ‘artist credited as…’ box for the release name and track credits etc.
