Question is as the title says. If I want to add a Release, but am not familiar with an artist (say, a featured artist), how do I go about this?
I was about to fill in a Release, one of my ListenBrainz unlinked. But there’s a featured artist, who shows up on Spotify with no information whatsoever, no Releases. Nothing but this feature. And MusicBrainz has at least three artists with the same name. I don’t know if any match, I don’t know exactly how to figure this out. My quick research online has shown signs of someone that could fit, but I can’t exactly confirm. How should one go about it in this scenario?
On occasion, I’ve sent the artist that I think is the correct one an email (or other contact method) explaining that I’m updating the information in MusicBrainz and asking them to confirm whether or not they are the correct artist. I’m about 50% on having them respond.
Thank you for asking instead of selecting without knowing. @aerozol makes a good case when some amount of research fails to find the artist. This may be one of the hardest parts about adding a release (especially various artists). My first step is to look in discogs, but recently there were “many” with the same name and nothing that stood out to link to any of them (plus discogs has been wrong many times). If you are familiar with the main artist or the genre you may be able to google the main artist and the features artist together (along with the song) to find some link to a YouTube or a news article that will help you. None of this is easy or quick and can take a lot of time. I usually spend only 10-30 minutes researching before creating a new artist like @aerozol suggests. That artist may get merged with a correct one later on or just have the one link to the song. Its the building out of the data that slowly allows us to to find and attribute these artists that are unknown to us.