The main question to ask yourself with compilations is “have these tracks been available before?”
If the majority of the tracks were previously out as Singles or on other Albums, then you add the compilation flag. Or if these tracks are gathered from other sources like YouTube, again you’d call it a compilation.
If it is mainly new tracks, then it would not get the compilation flag added.
With the Various Artists tracks I can’t really help. I don’t know who MEGAREX are and see that they seem to both be an Artist and a Label. Which is a little confusing to me.
Edit to add: I am no Japanese expert, but they all look like Various Artists Compilations to me. Each one I have clicked on links back to iTunes or Spotify with the Various Artist tag. I think someone has been incorrectly changing the Artist to the Label name.
Is there an artist called MEGAREX?
Hopefully one of the other Japanese Music editors can come along with a better answer. From the way I see this I think ALL of MEGAREX is really Various Artists release on the MEGAREX label…
There isn’t a MEGAREX artist, the releases listed there are all Various Artists releases.
If it is mainly new tracks, then it would not get the compilation flag added.
Likely to be the case, I’ve been searching whether the individual tracks have already been released anywhere else before but it doesn’t seem to be that way. MEGAREX label’s YouTube channel only uploads mixes of their Various Artists releases.
I’d be interested in @yindesu’s opinion. This is certainly an area they understand.
I’m just polishing up the Cricket Bat of Compliance™ as I want to get in there and set them all back to Various Artist Compilations. I am just aware that some Japanese releases get different rules and I don’t want to break those.
The idea that there’s a one size fits all solution for doujin music doesn’t work. It’s really a case-by-case thing.
In this case, MEGAREX is really more of a label than an artist. If you go to their homepage, they actually introduce themselves as a label in two different languages. What muddies the waters a bit is the fact that if you go to Bandcamp, they actually have a bunch of albums with MEGAREX listed as the album artist (even if they’re as V.A on other services). However, I’d still pretty confidently call them a label instead of an artist.
However, some doujin circles are definitely artists where they act more like as a band (with varying degrees of consistency on the members) than a label. Pizuya’s Cell and Tamaonsen are examples of circles that work more like that. But groups like MEGAREX, Diverse System and wavforme really mostly just act as labels.
Most of those are also credited to an artist with the same name as the label even though they probably shouldn’t (wavforme at least uses レーベル in their Twitter bio and Diverse System introduces themselves as レーベルのようなモノ). I think I’ve added some wavforme releases as V.A but they’ve been changed to “wavforme” afterwards.
Anyway on Bandcamp, it seems to me that you cannot do what you want for artist credit.
It’s obvious on multi-artist releases, the release artist will always be the hosting Bandcamp account.
So we should not really take Bandcamp artist credits in consideration.
I think using the username of the account holder as the album artist is the default, so I would read the above releases being credited to them by name as little more than an oversight, if they’re credited as VA elsewhere/in other situations.
I’m still not sure on how to handle the only recording under MEGAREX artist.
Seems like it’s a part of a release containing recordings representative of their label, half personal labels (ex. tatsuta recordings, Confetto), half circles (ex. MEGAREX, S2TB Recording)
Perhaps that could be the only exception for using MEGAREX as an artist?
