I don’t merge artists; it’s more destructive than I normally like to ponder. But while adding works and authors from liner notes I ran across a couple of oddities.
Among the songwriters for this release, there exists a fellow with multiple used names, both intentional and unintentional: David Marouani, David Maruani, David Gategno. There are two artists that are intentionally carried separately and linked together.
But there’s another, Frédéric Chateau, who is often credited as Asdorve, but everything links to the full name with Asdorve as an alias.
So that I understand, how are these cases different and when would artists ever be merged, except from obvious clerical error?
(Vaguely related, the “your topic is similar to” accurately identifies posts with similar words, but five or six years old, and it seems policy could evolve in that length of time.)
the same entity shouldn’t have multiple entries in the database. for name variations one can add aliases and we can also credit a person with a different name. as I see it “David Gategno” and “David Marouani” should be merged.
So you really need to know the artist to decide, and there can be disagreement about this. Basically, if this person uses a different name for a different project, if it is like a “persona” working in a different genre, if they don’t want this project to be associated with their real name (or their other performance name), you can have two artists.
I don’t know about this specific case, but maybe you do. If you feel there’s not intent to have some releases under a different “persona”, you can submit the merge edit and just explain that in the note.
Alas, I don’t. I just saw this as an opportunity to learn more. This is a songwriter on a (favoured) album I own, and I’m not familiar with him specifically.