ArtistComment - MusicBrainz Wiki

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Artist Comment

Description

The artist comment is a field in the database used to help users distinguish between identically named artists.

Additional informations

You will be prompted to enter a comment any time you enter a new artist which shares a name with an existing artist.

The artist comment will appear in the search results next to each name: so, ideally, the comment should be kept fairly short. A few words is normally enough, just enough that someone reading it will recognize the artist they're looking for. The comment field is not a place to store general background information about the artist: that kind of information should go in the ArtistAnnotation.

Note that the system will automatically prompt you to enter a comment for the new artist, but not for the old one. To make the search results a little clearer, it's a good idea to go back and enter a comment for the old artist as well. This can be done on the EditArtistPage of the old artist.

It has been suggested that this feature should be enabled for all artists (even when their name is unique in the database).

Editing trick

There is actually an editing trick that will allow you to add an artist comment to just any artist:

edit the artist, and change the artist name to an existing artist name...
when hitting submit, the edit will not be applied immediately, as you will be prompted to confirm that you want to perform this change, by providing a comment and by ticking a confirmation checkbox
now change the artist name back to its original name, provide an artist comment, tick the confirmation checkbox, write an edit note, submit. That's it!

Examples

In order to distinguish between Randy Jackson, brother of Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson, and Randy Jackson, former bassist with Journey, we use artist comments. The former has comment "Brother of Michael and Janet." while the latter has "Former bassist with Journey".

Issues

Note that some concerns have been voiced about the choice of the name ArtistComment.

Additional Readings

Once familiar enough with the resources accessible from the top navigation toolbar, you may find convenient to have direct access to the following pages:

StyleGuidelines:

Resources discussing some specific difficulty or advanced topic:

If you're interested into either the future or the past, you possibly want to take a look at ArtistFuture (which lists known bugs and our super secret new masterplans), and ArtistHistory (obviously listing closed bugs and past masterplans).

CategoryTerminology CategoryArtist CategoryWikiDocsPage

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This page is part of the official MusicBrainz editor documentation (version 1.0), and is monitored by TransclusionEditor: dmppanda