And then there’s Spotify, where many of the artists are totally different.
It looks like some of this may be due to Alfred Scholz pseudonyms which Spotify has unpacked, but it’s hard to be sure about all of them. How would you deal with this? Enter two releases with different ACs?
I typically throw away Spotify-specific track titles and artist credits. In my experience, Spotify does some radical “standardizing” of their track titles (like replacing sets of parentheses with a leading hyphen) as well as “standardization” of artist credits by not having the concept of join phrases.
edit: But if Classical applies to this release, then the artist credits may not actually matter…
You’re right, the credits should follow CSG. But the performers can still be credited. My main concern is figuring out what the heck the credits mean. Look at the first track: Google and Deezer list Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. Deezer also has János Sándor. Those appear to be legit credits in MusicBrainz, but Spotify has “London Festival Orchestra Alfred Scholz”.
It does look like the typical Alfred Scholz fare. The Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra is on the list of possibly fraudulently used artist names. And “Feel Good Classics” is just the kind of cheap, crappy compilation that you would expect those recordings to turn up on.
I think it would be good to have a catch-all “Alfred Scholz’ Bogus Orchestra” artist to consolidate all those recordings on, and use artist credits on the releases. Without the physical release, it’s going to be pretty hard to establish which name is used here, but does it really matter?