Artist
An artist is generally a musician, group of musicians, or other music professional (like a producer or engineer). Occasionally, it can also be a non-musical person (like a photographer, an illustrator, or a poet whose writings are set to music), or even a fictional character. For some other special cases, see special purpose artists.
Examples
- Coldplay
- John Williams (soundtrack composer & conductor)
- John Williams (classical guitar player)
- Pink Floyd
- Seattle Symphony
- Bill Porter
Style guidelines
Please see the guidelines for artists.
Artist properties
Name
The official name of an artist, be it a person or a band.
Sort name
The sort name is a variant of the artist name which would be used when sorting artists by name, such as in record shops or libraries. Among other things, sort names help to ensure that all the artists that start with "The" don't end up up under "T". The guidelines for sort names are the best place to check for more specific usage info.
Type
The type is used to state whether an artist is a person, a group, or something else. For more about types check the artist type documentation.
Gender
The gender is used to explicitly state whether a person or character identifies as male, female or neither. Groups do not have genders.
Area
The artist area, as the name suggests, indicates the area with which an artist is primarily identified with. It is often, but not always, its birth/formation country.
Begin and end dates
See the page about dates for more information.
IPI code
An IPI (interested party information) code is an identifying number assigned by the CISAC database for musical rights management. See IPI for more information, including how to find these codes.
Alias
Aliases are used to store alternate names or misspellings. For more information and examples, see the page about aliases.
MBID
See the page about MBIDs for more information.
Disambiguation comment
See the page about comments for more information.
Annotation
See the page about annotations for more information.
