How to properly split artists that shouldn't have existed as collaboration entity

[chaban]

A beginner just asked me a rather simple question* for which I don’t have a definitive answer.

Jose Chameleone feat. Weasel was added as a collaboration artist but these two should rather have been entered utilizing artist credits.

This is now being corrected by truncating the collaboration to the first artist, creating a new entity for the featured artist and changing the artist credits.

This is not the first I’ve seen it done this way, sometimes combined with a merge, e.g.

• Edit #57577921 and Edit #57348447
• Edit #67220497 and Edit #67220495
• Edit #66309233 and Edit #66309247

I’m not sure yet if that’s proper. If you argue to preserve the MBID and its history it might seem that way.

Shouldn’t the bogus collaboration rather be deleted and new artists be created, if needed, since they are not the same thing?
The How to Split Artists doc doesn’t provide clear advice on this matter.

When the split function was developed someone asked the same question:

@torc

It’d be useful in the interim to document the best way to handle these using the current tools. Like if I wanted to split everything by ‘Artist One’ With ‘Artist B’, would the best thing to do be merge the joint artist with one of the solo profiles (without updating credits), then manually add the other credits, or would that hopelessly screw something up? Is it better to change the credits manually and then just delete the joint artist outright?

@voiceinsideyou

I would suggest that doing such a merge to a solo artist is a very bad idea from an MBID sense. This would make the previous “collab artist” deemed to be identical to one of the solo artists when looked up by its MBID, which is inaccurate.

I’d say the joint artist should be deleted outright.

When you are one of those in favor of merging the joint artist rather than letting modbot delete it, think about which target to choose and why. Truncating to the first artist is easy but why not any of the others?

* I got their message directly, not via edit note. I’ll provide it and my reply for transparency reasons below.

Their question

Danke für die Korrekturen. Bevor ich das wieder falsch mache und da ich den Fall in keinem How-To finde: Ich wollte ja Jose Chameleone feat. Weasel splitten, allerdings gab es beide noch nicht. Daher habe ich dann Weasel neu angelegt und wollte “Jose Chameleone feat. Weasel” zu Jose Chameleone umfunktionieren. Richtig wäre beide neu anzulegen und dann zu splitten?

My reply

Da stellst du eine sehr interessante Frage. Zugegeben, ich weiß selber nicht welche Vorgehensweise “die richtige” oder “beste” ist.

Oftmals sind beide Künstler bereits in der Datenbank vertreten und das splitten gestaltet sich in diesen Fällen dann denkbar einfach.

Ich habe es aber schon häufiger gesehen, dass einer oder mehrer der Künstler fehlen und manche Bearbeiter stutzten den vorhandenen Eintrag dann auf den ersten Namen runter. So wie du es gerade vor hast.

Nun bin ich der Meinung, dass dies nicht richtig sein kann, da ja die Kollaboration nicht das gleiche ist wie nur eine der beiden Personen.

Wenn man nun aber die Kollaboration “richtig” splittet, würde sie am Ende gelöscht werden. Die MBID ist dann ungültig und es gibt keine einfache Möglichkeit mehr zu sehen was damit geschehen ist und welche edits vorhergegangen sind.

Grundsätzlich sollten Löschungen vermieden werden:
Merge Rather Than Delete - MusicBrainz

Hier ist nun das Problem, dass es derzeit keine bessere Funktion zum splitten gibt. Wenn du mergen möchtest, musst du dich für ein Ziel entscheiden und keines ist wirklich equivalent zu der Kollaboration.

Ich konnte bisher noch keine definitive Antwort in vorherigen Diskussionen auf dieses Dilemma finden und werde daher einen Thread im Forum erstellen.

[Fabe56]

@chaban

When you are one of those in favor of merging the joint artist rather than letting modbot delete it, think about which target to choose and why. Truncating to the first artist is easy but why not any of the others?

For the target, I would say that it depends. In the case of a featuring for sure, I would choose the main artist as the target otherwise on the basis of the editing history and what external link is already present in order to preserve maximum clarity.

[chaban]

A few months this has been brought up by @salo.rock

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@Freso once said:

I’d agree if it was an equal relation (e.g., “Atrium & Helena”) since there wouldn’t be a clear “primary” part of this. For “A ft. B”, A is clearly the primary and B is “tacked on”, and as such I find the need to preserve MBID ranks higher.

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Another thing to keep in mind is it requires post-merge cleanup as pointed out by @drsaunde

[jesus2099]

I think to split artists, we should in most cases use the aforementioned sidebar Split into separate artists feature, not the merge feature.

But to be able to use Split into separate artists you must first remove all relationships (including URL), otherwise:

This artist has relationships other than collaboration relationships, and cannot be split until these are removed. View all relationships.

This reason and maybe also because Merge is more well known by editors, make this feature under-used, unfortunately.

[chaban]

Recently discussed on IRC by @reosarevok and @yvanzo when @iolomorganwg wasn’t sure whether to merge a collaboration artist.