Style/Unknown and untitled/Special purpose artist
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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 EditType
s.
- 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
- Capcom
- 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
- Namco
- Nintendo
- Pamplin Music
- Pickin' On
- Scary Sounds
- Sega
- (The) Smithsonian Collection
- The Smurfs
- Vineyard Music
- Warner Classics
- Wordsound
- 3D Realms