Confused about how to add a bio paragraph / photo of an artist

Hello there!
I’ve added a new artists to the database, including all the dry details about the releases etc, but cannot find where to add a bio paragraph and a photo, so that it all appears under the artist name’s google search.

thanks very much in advance!

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you can not add a bio paragraph. it is a legal thing

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Well sort of.

If you write the bio paragraph yourself then there are no copyright problems. And if it contains no slander or libel then it very likely legal.
But just cut and paste of a bio that someone else has written is problematic and against policy AIUI.

ekennermusic, you’ve raised an interesting point around bios.
The general approachthat I’ve seen has been to link to offsite bios.
This now seems strange for an encyclopedia.
Wider discussion is needed.

Photos ofArtists do face legal problems around copyright.
There had been movement on getting these important images happening.
But then a copyright troll case came up and AIUI, progress has slowed.
More disussion and information is needed around this topic.
You can read past contributions here:

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Those Artists who have a Wikipedia article about them and have that article linked as an External Link, or a Wikidata link, have their Wikipedia article appear on their MB Artist page.

But Wikipedia has very exclusive standards for who can be the subject of a WP article.
Whereas Musicbrainz has very inclusive standards.

I’d suggest frame the bio in a way that makes it helpful to future MB Editors and then include it in the Annotation for the Artist.

You can find the “Edit annotation” link lowish on the right hand side of the MB Artist page.

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whoops my bad i ment image not paragraph i read paragraph as photograph

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As it relates to artist bios, what I believe is a solid policy is stick to the raw facts. If you write something like “Mary was born on 21 May 2000 in Paris, France. She was signed to her first record label, Sony, in July of 2015. Her musical style is pop.”, it is real hard for someone to claim copyright on that, unless you are copying it word for word, but even then, it is a statement of all fact and no editorial.

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For why pictures are not used see the blog post.

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Probably my note will be a little bit offtopic, but i am using MusicBee as media player and it can pull and display artist images from last.fm, fanart.tv, google and itunes. Would be nice if MB could have such artist profiles (with images) like on last.fm.

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If one wants to contribute artist images I can really recommend contributing to fanart.tv. You will likely need to put in some work, since they have their quality requirements, but they offer a really high quality service. And the best of all: They tightly integrate with MusicBrainz and you can easily query their artist or album art collection by MusicBrainz IDs.

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We all don’t know exactly what Google is doing, but I doubt adding the image to MB would help getting it shown in Google searches. Looking at the Google results I see for bands it looks like they primarily use Wikipedia for the biographies and images come from their image search and are from various sources.

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Thanks, @outsidecontext, will note this. There is a problem with last.fm that player probably tries to search an artist simply by name, not by some id and thus shows wrong images. May be fanart.tv is better in this terms.

Fanart.tv uses MusicBrainz IDs to distinguish artists. So fanart.tv is absolutely tons better than last.fm in this regard. :slight_smile:

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