Tracks credited to composer rather than track artist -- specifically, Ed Starink and his synthesizer covers (non-Classical)

A couple edits have come about in the past week or so that I don’t agree with, and I wanted to get the wisdom of the community on what is the best and/or correct way to do it.

The ones I’m looking at specifically involve Ed Starink, a Dutch synthesizerist who has released several albums of cover versions of various instrumental hits; for examples:

https://musicbrainz.org/edit/56321492

https://musicbrainz.org/edit/56464107

Looking at the covers of these releases, and the tracks are credited to the composers, while Starink is the “album artist”.

My opinion is that since Starink performs the tracks as well, he should also be credited as the track artist, with composers credited via work relationships.

Others hold that the composers should be the track artists, and sometimes citing Soundtrack style for this (although I wouldn’t consider the releases “soundtracks”, so I don’t personally think that applies).

Thoughts on this would be welcome.

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I agree with you. It’s not a soundtrack, its not classical, than the album artist gets the credit. Works relationships would show the covers.

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Based on the track listing, it appears to be a nearly-even mixture of classical + soundtrack works, versus a few that are clearly pop covers and several (e.g. Vangelis, Jarre) that straddle the line between classical and pop.

Given that I would lean towards crediting the composer. I definitely can’t see any reason to leave it credited as [unknown] though.

Edit: Also, based on the cover art the tracklist credits the composer, not the performer.

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I agree with you. It is not only Ed Starink.
I remember there used to be quite some fake compilations of famous songs also when I was young in the eighties.
They would trick people by not properly show the anonymous performers and emphasise the famous composers. They could not show the famous performers.
They used people credulity naïveness to sell those records, people thought they bought The Beatles because they read LET IT BE and everything but they end up hearing some lousy recordings that do not deserve to be called covers.
We should surely identify them whenever we can and stop the treachery and credit cover artists and not composers.


BTW Ed Starink releases and others of this kind (we still have some in 2018) are fake compilations and should not be set as such. They are lousy cover album scams.
We should also make sure that none of their recordings are merged with the original recordings.

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A comment re the classicals on Starink’s releases: at the risk of veering off-topic, there does seem to be a de facto allowance to not use CSG for pop renditions of classical works. An example would be Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven”, which as near as I can tell is never entered in CSG. That’s an admittedly extreme example to one side, but I would argue that Starink’s performances of classical works also fall into that “pop” category.

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