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"Artists" used for handling special cases

In a number of cases, it was convenient to create phony artists in the database to deal with some special cases. The reasons for that varied widely. There also (still) exists a number of bogus artists that need to be sorted out, but are convenient to keep for now. All these are SpecialPurposeArtists.

Please note that you shouldn't create any new SpecialPurposeArtist all by yourself without prior discussion about it, usually on the style MailingList.

Also, before using any of these, you may check ReleaseArtistStyle and TrackArtistStyle.

List by case use

Special cases

A number of Artists are used for special cases; some of them are directly addressed in the StyleGuidelines:

• Various Artists (see the documentation about VariousArtists)

• [data track] (see the documentation about DataTrack)

• [unknown] (see the documentation about UnknownArtist)

• [no artist] (see the documentation about NoArtist)

Informal special cases

Others are used more informally:

• [anonymous]

• [dialogue]

• [gregorian chant]

• [news report]

• [spiritual]

• [traditional]

• Ethnic Music Compilations

Incorrect collection artists

Others are kept only to accommodate for the various mis-tagged releases in FreeDB. No releases should be added to them; instructions on what to do with the existing ones can be found in the relevant "artist's" annotation:

• Bollywood

• Disney - has its own wikipage. Disney

• Data CD

• Musical

• MusicBrainz Test Artist

• MusicBrainz Test Artist (Yet another test artist) - to test behavior of Various Artists AddReleaseEdit and ImportRelease EditTypes.

• Soundtrack

• Classical

Collection artists

There are some entries in the database that do not represent artist names, but names of collections for which the real artists are not known, or names of software companies.
These should have their composer(s) found and moved/converted there.

• Alan Lomax Collection, The

• Allegro Corporation

• BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)

• BBC Radio Collection

• Christmas Music

• (The) Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

• Dancelife

• ESPN

• Hollywood Edge

• KONAMI

• LaserLight Digital

• Lifescapes

• Linguaphone

• Living Language

• Looney Tunes

• Nature Sounds

• Nintendo

• Pamplin Music

• Pickin' On

• Pokemon

• Scary Sounds

• Sega

• (The) Smithsonian Collection

• The Smurfs

• Vineyard Music

• Warner Classics

• Wordsound

• 3D Realms

Discussion

Created this page in response to the following moderations, as a better forum for discussion of these artist names. Feel free to expand/improve the documentation above as well...

http://www.musicbrainz.org/showmod.html?modid=2463580 http://www.musicbrainz.org/showmod.html?modid=2472728

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I think it is counterproductive that artist for anonymous is [anon.] but artist for trad. is [traditional] they should be the same. either both the abbreviated or both the full word.

Someone mentioned something about that on the mailing list, but I do not recall who ~mo

• I thought there was something from TarragonAllen saying it should be expanded (à la Volume) and I tend to agree, preferring [anonymous] to [anon.] for this. @alex

Where should 'artists' like Nintendo and Microsoft go? --Zout

• In some cases, there are audio tracks for games that are "production music" and there's no proper composer other than "the employees of the game division of XXX Co." In those cases, having Nintendo or Microsoft as the artist is probably as correct as we can possibly get. It's worth noting in an ArtistAnnotation that many games do in fact have a credited composer or music engineer who should be the artist. @alex

  • I'd like to comment that Nintendo, much like 'soundtrack' is a placement artist type thing for Nintendo game-soundtracks, as Nintendo has yet to make computer games, are all discs under Nintendo, music CD's. Have moved Zelda ones to Koji Kondo for example. to be confusing one Age of Empires disc under 'Microsoft' is not a game CD but an actual soundtrack. IMHO this sould not be under 'Data CD'. so in lieu of all this I have thought to go look over my game CD's to see if there is any music-composing info in the credits.. ~mo

    • Although I disagree with dupuy, a good example is Bungie here, as that track is just a silly bit of audio of some guy saying "I've got a bad feeling about this" at different speeds. I think [no artist] is more correct. Maybe, though, in this instance it would be possible to find out who did the voice acting for that clip and credit them. Maybe it would be better to credit someone from the sound departmant of the game? At least it's a human rather that a company. ~[SenRepus]

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I think we could build another special Artist, altough I'm generally against this kind of complication. I'm talking about Gregorian music that is quite particular. Strictly following rules it has to be [anon.] because no one knows who wrote it, but it is in fact the born of all occidental music and probably deserves an exception. Moreover it's a very limited and unique type of music that is always grouped together in phisical and online stores. Now on MB we have a lot of release spread under bogus Artist and I wish we could fix it. --ClutchEr2

• I'd say to go for it; we, the users build the database. Just add a clear annotation describing what the artist is for... --azertus

  • (noting that I didn't quite understand you wanted to create new artist [Gregorian] or similar, an idea I am not *that* much against, really) but then comes the other task. of deciding when something is Gregorian or when something is 'anon' ? ~mo

  • You might want to clean up Gregorian Chants... --Zout

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As you can see, some of these SpecialPurposeArtist are in brackets [] and lowercase, that is a good way to quick identify them. I think they all have to be this way; also because there could be easly be a proper Artist named, for example, "Sound of Nature". --ClutchEr2

• The artists in brackets really represent artists; the other ones, like Disney and Sounds of Nature, are merely places for badly entered releases to reside. Ideally, they should not exist. This is not the case for [anon.] and such. --Zout

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Maybe someone should explain those artists here. E.g. what's the difference between [unkown] and [anon.]? --Fuchs

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Regarding Hollywood Edge: Judging from the apparently official webpage http://soundfx.com/HollywoodEdge.htm, I think the name should be written "The Hollywood Edge" (including the definite article, just like The Beatles). I don't fully understand if this is the name of a "group", a publisher (seems to be published by SoundFX.com, though) or a product (a series of releases). Probably the latter. Since MusicBrainz doesn't seem to have a way to group and name a series of releases, I think it would be appropriate to keep this as an artist. --LA2, April 21, 2006

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CategoryDiscussion CategoryMetadata CategoryArtist