Artist: to merge or not to merge

[Darkloke]

Greetings. Have a question about this artist(s) and should they be merged or not:

Aeone Victoria Watson

Aeone

Vikki Watson

Personally i know nothing about artist above - i met it while adding/editing pure production music album (where in 99% cases only composer credits),

TBH i always dont completely understand MB system about artist “projects” and their uniqueness. To me its quite simple - since i am often working with the information from PRO units (ASCAP, BMI, etc.), every artist almost always is credited under its legal name there, so there is no difference how many aliases or “projects” it has - credits always for its legal name. So why not to implement similar system here? Lets say we would have only one (unique) artist record under its full legal name (so all work credits on work relationship would be under full legal name too), but on track list and/or recordings level it could be under any alias/name + also all this aliases would be in one place (aliases tab) for this artist.

May be i still (as i said) dont get something, but for now i see at least the following problem - having several MB artist ids for one artist (as entity) would mean different artists in music player for example. So if one track is credited (at composer level) as “AB” and other - as "“AC” the player will show them as 2 different composers, while defacto this is the same person with different aliases (on recording level).

[ernstlx]

@Darkloke

having several MB artist ids for one artist (as entity) would mean different artists in music player for example.

Yes, but that’s by purpose: in a library like KODI different projects would be mingled. Instead they are related: XXX also performs as YYY

@Darkloke

if one track is credited (at composer level) as “AB” and other - as "“AC” the player will show them as 2 different composers

On composer level I would try to avoid this. It’s possible to use credited as instead. But I think even that shouldn’t be done.

[jesus2099]

My English level does not allow me to fully understand this topic.

But for this particular point:

@ernstlx

On composer level I would try to avoid this. It’s possible to use credited as instead. But I think even that shouldn’t be done.

Some works are officially written specifically under a pen name (pseudonym), so we should not replace this pen name (credited as) by the artist name.

[ernstlx]

@jesus2099

My English level does not allow me to fully understand this topic.

Sorry about that, I try to be as clear as possible - and I will not merge any artists with their pseudonyms

But for initial example: that is probably a case where the artists should be merged. It’s always the same name or parts of it. In a similar case they were merged: Rebekka to Rebekka Karijord.