Artist Name Change and Album Art

I’m the Program Director for a radio station, and I recently discovered that our streaming provider uses MusicBrainz to pull cover art for our music.

I recently had a case where an artist we play on one of our stations changed her name. Because of her reasoning for wanting to move from her old name to her new one, we went ahead and updated our library so that all her music past and present reflected her new name. Her label had already done the same with all her releases on DSPs, etc.

Here’s the issue I’m guessing I’ll have moving forward (but haven’t been able to test due to the Internet Archive being down): all her music in our library is under her name, but Musicbrainz has all her releases under her old name, with the exception of the most recent ones that came out under her new name. So that means my metadata coming from my station to the streaming provider won’t (I assume) match the data on Musicbrainz, which would keep me from having album cover art for those older songs.

What’s the proper procedure to fix this? I know style guidelines say older releases stay under the old name. Do I need to make new releases of the older albums with the new name but a release date of early July when she changed the name?

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When the label changed her name on her old releases, it counts as a new release for MusicBrainz.
Because I guess you mean download albums, not CD.

So if we add those re-releases (release date = name change), maybe it will all be fine.

What is the artist MB URL?
You can test now, the cover arts are back online.

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The artist is Anike, and her MB URL is here: Anike - MusicBrainz

As I have time this week, I’ll try to add in new releases and see what I get. I may have to chase down refreshes of data from my streaming provider, so it may take a little bit to figure out what’s working.

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