It’s my understanding that for people, the intent of ISNIs is to map to artist personas, and not real-world natural persons. Very similar to MB artists, which is nice.
An ISNI is assigned to a public identity of a party.
– https://isni.org/resources/pdfs/isni-pseudonyms.pdf
However, despite this policy, many ISNI entries conflate different public personas of the same artist. Some popular artists have had their personas split into multiple ISNIs, but even that is uneven eg,
https://isni.org/isni/0000000120269646 for Snoop Dogg, Snoop Lion,
https://isni.org/isni/000000036862877X for Calvin Broadus
Is there any guidance on how to deal with this in Musicbrainz? eg, there are MUBZ artists for ‘Dogg, ‘Lion, and Calvin Broadus. Should ‘Snoop Lion’ have an ISNI associated with it?
If an ISNI lists a performance persona and a legal name, is there even a distinction between the names in the header, with one being primary and one an alias? eg ISNI 0000000478474804 lists a legal name, and a performance name. I’ve associated this ISNI with both mb artists, but am unclear if this is the right thing to do.