Recording artist credit for DJ mix tracks

Usually for DJ-mixed tracks, online stores use “Various Artist” as artist credit. But MusicBrainz display warning when track artist credit set to “Various Artist”, so I use DJ mixer as artist credit or [unknown] if the DJ mixer is unknown. But on edit #90302913, other editor vote no on my edit, so I wonder what is the correct artist credit for DJ mix tracks?

I’ve set the DJ-mixer as the artist previously, but I have also seen cases where each of the track’s artists are given a split credit. for example:

if it’s a single recording (one long audio file), then you can credit with a slash between each artist, similar to what was done on track 10 of disc 1 above.


I will note, I’m not too experienced adding DJ-mixes, but I don’t think many on the forums are… :melting_face:

No clear answer as it depends of the content and how it’s promoted.

To make it more easy I personnally split between those cases:

In other words think about how you listen to the release: Do you pick it for the mix performance or as it s a nice compilation of tracks you like?

Then that’s not a perfect science and I tend to keep DJ/Compiler credited when going to some obscure release where the name is used to credit the work done and not just for marketing :slight_smile:
ex: Release “Enchanting Songs of Thailand and Cambodia” by Jaro Sounder - MusicBrainz

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Sorry if I misunderstand your answer, but I’m discussing about track-level artist credit, not release-level artist credit. For release artist credit, I agree with you.

On digital release of DJ mixed album, they usually contain unmixed version of tracks and a long DJ-mixed track at the end of the release, like this one. On digital store, those “end-of-album” DJ mix tracks usually have “Various Artist” as artist credit. But if you enter “Various Artist” as track artist credit, MusicBrainz will give you warning like this:


So I don’t know if DJ-mixed track is legitimate use of Various Artist.

if you click the “Edit” button to the right of the artist field, you can credit multiple artists to the same track. the standard in the guidelines is to separate them with " / " (space-slash-space).

if you can’t find who the artists are, I think it’s more typical to use the Special Purpose Artist [unknown]

Indeed I was thinking about physical releases on my answer but I got what you mean: Digital versions being released as separated tracks + the full mix as one track to avoid gaps between tracks due to some file formats.

Personally I would keep to same logicial as for the physical releases described above in order to be consistent.