Same release with different artist

I have seen this a few times now. An artist starts a new project under a different name and on the new Bandcamp page they put up the older releases under the new name.

One example is Release “Tales From the Flesh” by Mind Wired Shut - MusicBrainz it’s the same as Release “Tales From the Flesh” by Blut Reaktor - MusicBrainz and it even have the old artist name on the cover.

How should this be handled? Put them in the same group?

3 Likes

the thing with Bandcamp, if an artist doesn’t enter an album artist for a release (i.e. they leave it blank), it defaults to the main page’s artist name. so if they change that name, it’ll also change all their old releases, whether intentionally or not.

I likely wouldn’t create a new release if I suspected this was happening, but if they’re already there, they certainly should be in the same release group. if you know when it was changed, I might set that as the changed album’s release date, otherwise leave it blank

in cases where it seems more intentional, like if they change the album art to use the new name, then you should likely use the withdrawn release status. this doesn’t look like one of those cases though… :wink:


one additional thing, you can connect both artists through a legal name artist, that way both projects are shown on both pages. as an example:

note, depending on which direction you’re relating, the relationship could be called Legal Name or Performs As

it would seem this artist’s name is on their Discogs page already, so that makes that easy~

1 Like

At least release group and recordings should be the same.

As to what to do with those 2 digital releases, I leave you guys figuring out, I don’t edit in this area. :shushing_face:

2 Likes

There is also the same situation with Sister Cell / Null Cell, but there at least some of the releases have covers with the new name.

just glancing at their discographies, it looks like they’re both active at the same time, from 2020–present… are you sure one became the other?

I think that’s because they just re-released the old releases under the new name, but with the same release date.

ah, in that case the re-releases should use the date they were re-released, not the original date. if the re-release date isn’t known, just blank it. if the releases are in the same release group, you can get the original date easily enough

another note, if they’re re-releasing albums this way, that tells me that maybe the two groups should be merged? sometimes a group changes names and is the same “entity”, sometimes they become a different “entity”. different editors can draw the line in different places though

however I leave that decision entirely up to you and your gut~

1 Like