Is it ok to use "Various Artists" for track artists sometimes?

The following various artists release has a missing artist credit for one of the tracks (track 3) on the cover:

At the moment the track “Afrika” is credited to “Afrika” (not a real group). The performers are known, but it would seem a bit excessive/unwieldly to put them in the AC field - so I was wondering if it would ok to use VA instead for the track credit.

Thanks

I ran into this same question when I was cleaning up the credits for Live Stiffs Live. The last song on the album is performed by all the musicians from the various bands on the tour and is credited to “All” or “Entire Crew”, depending on which release you’re looking at. After a discussion on the old forums, I changed the credit to Various Artists, with the appropriate artist credit.

In your case, I would probably leave the credit as “Various Artists” since there isn’t an artist credit on the release art. You’d probably want to put a note in the release’s annotation so future editors won’t immediately try to change the credit.

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Thanks - have done as suggested.

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In my personal opinion, I think it’s better to do one of the following:

  1. Actually add every single person to the artist credit, there really isn’t a rule that states that there’s a max on people to put into it. and these “mega amount of artists” type recordings aren’t super common so we won’t et a huge influx cluttering up everything (besides it might be interesting to see this data!)
    -> pro: “platonically” true. (ie, actually true.) interesting for our data.
    -> con: will create a huge credit-list and not be “as on cover”
  2. Create a “pseudo-group” with the name as on the actual tracklist (with a descriptive disambiguation comment!) and then link everyone on it as “member of”
    -> pro: be as on cover, easy to do
    -> con: can create many superfluous “groups” with similar or same names

In general I’d do 1. if it’s an one shot, and 2. if this conglomeration ever did anything else together, but it’s up to the editor to figure out what makes the most sense to them.
In any case I’d definitely make sure Relationships are linked !

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Seems this has been merged into a recording credited to the songwriter anyway…