This kind of stuff has bothered me for quite some time and most of the digital marketplaces are offenders of this, but Spotify is probably the worst offender. I am sure many of you are aware of these types of releases.
What is the best course of action for a scenario when a random junk release is added to an artist on Spotify or wherever because the other “artist’s” name is the same, then some braindead person or bot adds the junk release to the real artist of that name.
Normally, I would not even ask something like this as the proper thing to do would be to make a new artist and move the release. However, in this case, and by extension all other cases of these junk “artists”, would it be considered fine to just delete the release/group rather than waste time and resources on low-effort and/or likely AI-generated music?
The example that prompted this question:
Funny enough, this one was commented on by the real artist:
Alternatively if deleting would still not be recommended for this, is there some sort of void or [no artist] type of place it can be attributed to instead?
It seemingly was corrected on Spotify at some point but they are still connected on other platforms like Deezer, which is where the editor added it from.
I spend a lot of time cleaning up incorrectly-attributed data, but I’d also be tempted to just delete low-effort junk like this. I can’t find any info online about the artist who released it, and I suspect it’s just a lazy effort to collect a few cents from streaming platforms by riding on someone else’s name.
(I’d also leave an edit note asking the editor to be more careful about who they credit, but the same editor ignored an earlier edit note I left about a different issue, so it’d likely be a waste of time.)
I would be against deleting it, even if it were AI-generated. if there is music here (even if it’s low effort), it counts for MusicBrainz. that said, I also wouldn’t likely add it myself, but since someone took time to add it, apparently somebody cares at least a little bit about the release in question
if you’re looking for guidance on how to split the artists, I’d recommend an annotation similar to the one I wrote up for Alex S.
Deleting the releases completely also risks having them eventually re-added to the same artist again. Better to split them out into a new artist imo. You can leave tags showing your feelings about the new “artist”
Based on the randomness of the content they add, I suspect they are a bot that is used to push AI junk content. Please excuse me, I must go look for the tinfoil hat I misplaced.
On a related note, if I were to update the artist of the release group, would that also move/update the artist of the release too? Or do I have to move the release and then just wait for the group to auto-delete?
Best to edit the release artist instead/first, and then check the “Copy the release artist credit to the release group” box that will appear.
Make sure the track credits are changed also, and apply all the changes to the recordings (by checking the “Update the recording artist credit to match the track artist credit.” box, at the bottom of the Recordings tab in the release editor).
I was checking the status of some edits for moving yet another addition of this album on the wrong artist, Requests for Votes Thread - #1555 by shakgriig, and I noticed the “artist” has been completely removed from all platforms now. It seems like the platforms are cracking down on these weird fake bands as I had some new ones show up last week for other bands and then were deleted within a couple of days, if not immediately.
So as a follow-up, what would normally done in the situation? Delete the artist? Set them as ended? Set some sort of void artist relationship/status I don’t know about?
