Featured artist[s] formatting - consistency with track name or musicbrainz convention?

As I was editing, I came across my first instance of featured artists being included in the track name. My understanding of the artist credits system led me to think that I should use the join phrases to try and mimic the original track name, which was in the format:

ArtistA - SongName (feat. ArtistB)

I thought the most representative way to do this was to use:

ArtistA (feat. ArtistB)

as the artist credit, as the text would be unchanged, although no longer in the track name segment.


@relgukxilef commented that this does not seem to be done elsewhere, and thinks that the Style Guide (Style / Artist Credits / Featured artists) frowns upon this. Upon review I agree, and am cancelling the edits.


I still think it is somewhat counterintuitive, that the featured artists format is consistent, yet the entire purpose of join phrases in artist credits is to allow a more faithful representation of the information as it was originally written.

Does anyone else have thoughts on the matter?

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This is where ‘artist intent’ comes into play I think -
If you have reason to believe that it was an important conscious decision by the artist to put brackets around the featured artist for that specific track/credit, then we would try to preserve it.
But usually the brackets are just a way to use text/layout to show that it’s separate from the title - which MB does just fine with different fields, so I don’t think there’s a need to represent that .

…except for with scans of the release! Which are always awesome because our text fields can’t represent all of these details :wink:

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