Clicking on “Show Various Artist releases instead.” for the Artist below shows no Various Artist releases.
Yet there is a Various Artists Release with that Artist/performer on it:
Is this the expected result for clicking on “Show Various Artist releases instead.”?
My expectation is that for classical releases “Composer X; Various Artists” would be returned by “Show Various Artist releases instead.”
The artist is not in the track credit for that release, so it doesn’t actually get shown. If one track had the artist in the artist credit, then it would show there (but would be incorrect, in this case, according to our classical guidelines 
)
I think that MB is better not misleading its users.
So eventually this will need to be fixed.
Partial list of fixes/solutions:
Add ‘Does not work with classical releases’ to
“Show Various Artist releases instead.”
Change way VA releases are selected for classical releases.
Leave users to be misled until some time in the future.
Anyone else got more fixes/solutions?
I wouldn’t say this is misleading. If you’re looking for a non-classical release with a specific guitarist (who was in a band, for example), you won’t find it like this either - it’s all about the actual track credits, which would in that case probably be to the band. If a third option “all releases this artist is related to” is added, that would be useful for this I imagine.
A naive user, seeking classical VA releases, is going to click that link.
And be misled as to the existence of classical VA releases.
The mechanism by which VA releases are selected are not relevant to considering whether a niave user would be misled.
This would be great.
If it replaced “Show Various Artist releases instead.” this would keep the UX in the bounds of accuracy.
I’m just confused about the meaning of “classical VA releases” here. I mean, that’s not any different for non-classical: if you sing in a song, but don’t get a track credit, it’s not in your list, but if you’re a featured artist in a track (so in the artist credit), it is in the list. Whether the artist credit says Various Artists or not
What I am pointing at is that “Show Various Artist releases instead.” has a clear meaning to a naive user - the meaning is that they will be shown the Various Artist Releases which have performances by their chosen Artist.
Nothing about track artist listing is relevant to a naive user. Us using track artists to get VA Releases is opaque and unknown to a naive user.
Requiring users to understand that “Show Various Artist releases instead.” actually will only show them “Releases with the Artist in some track artist fields but not the Release Artist field” before MB will function reliably for them, is to steepen the learning curve and burn site credibility for no apparent benefit.)
Salcito, in the example above, is a performer on a classical VA release. But the user is not shown that Release when they click on “Show Various Artist releases instead.”
In my view this is a simple issue of accuracy in communication with users. Same as a bottle in the supermarket labelled “milk” is actually milk and not kefir.
Sure, ok, I can see that But in that case, it’s not only a classical issue, it’s a wider problem with the way we understand “various artists releases” in this sense. On the other hand, technically, a naive user might assume that’s not a Various Artists release, but a Raffaele Bellafronte one! (in fact, the Various Artists as performers doesn’t fit classical guidelines much, so I removed it). So it’s unclear to me whether we’d want to have an option to show only specifically releases credited to Various Artists. “All releases the artist has a relationship in” I’d still think makes sense anyway, Discogs has it and it’s kinda useful.
@chhavi - has the new artist page redesign changed the way these things work? (just to make sure we’re not talking about a feature that’ll change in a few months anyway)
Thanks.
There are the real CSG.
And then there are my memories of them.
Some differences.
Are you talking about an artist not being part of an AC but linked with a relationship (e.g. “guest vocals”)? I mentioned the Artist’s Overview page redesign recently in Feature request: Show both “Album” and “Album + Compilation” in the same window. There could probably be a selection in the drop-down menu to show the releases where the artist is not in AC but linked with a relationship, however I don’t know if we should include these releases also in “All Releases” since it looks like they aren’t listed when looking at the artist discography currently (because they would pollute the page?). Let me know if I understand this thread correctly.
We don’t list them currently because we don’t consider them part of the discography as such, but it might make sense to include them in a “third view” with even more stuff than the other two. My main question about the new design is whether it even keeps the different “see this artist, see VA, see all” options, or whether it does it all differently
Before creating a new “CSG side-effect? release (group)s don’t appear in artist pages” topic I searched for existing topics and found this one. 
So I have this 100 track compilation that includes track 4.13: Cavatina by Barrios, played by Manuel Barrueco and Steve Morse.
So Manuel Barrueco is indeed marked as part of my collection.
But I had difficulty to find what CD this artist was on, even if the guitarist is a recording artist (not only a relationship):
It’s not a big hinder for me, as I have very few CSG CD.
But just sharing my experience.