What is the sense of external links of artists?

[Freso]

One of the things about external links, is that they enable MusicBrainz to function as a form of “rosetta stone” for music information. If you have a link or identifier from another site and system, you can look it up in MusicBrainz and hopefully both find a lot more information directly in MusicBrainz, but also links to places where you can find more information. Obviously, the more external links we have, the more things can be looked up in MusicBrainz. See also my post from 2½ years ago:

Echo Nest, Spotify, and the Rosetta api

MusicBrainz could itself function as a kind of “Rosetta Stone”, I guess? We have ISRCs, ISNIs, IPIs, ISWCs, bar codes, and label codes directly attached to their relevant entities. In addition to that, we have URL relationships which allow linking to Discogs, AllMusic, Spotify (not sure if it’s the actual Spotify ID in the Spotify URLs though?), VIAF, WorldCat (OCLC IDs), Wikidata, iTunes, and a number of other external services which has the ID in their URL. Of course, this is far mostly manua…

You may also find the discussion about whether MusicBrainz is “primarily a database or a tagging library” interesting:

Is MusicBrainz primarily a database or a tagging library?

Continuing the discussion from Guidelines on "feat." join phrase [STYLE-671]: If this isn’t already a settled question, it really should be. My understanding is that the MB project grew out of a tagging library, but is primarily a database. The first sentence of the About page has said as much since 2003. Of course, the transition has been gradual. As the data model improves, as Picard improves, MB becomes farther removed from its tagging-library roots. That said, I’m not an “as on cover” p…