Artist: Difference between revisions

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{{DocumentationHeader|Artist|Terminology}}
{{DocumentationHeader|Artist|Terminology}}
An artist is generally a musician, group of musicians, a collaboration of multiple musicians or other music professional contributing to the works described in the [[MusicBrainz Database]]. In other words, artists are ''usually'' people who sing or play instruments.


Special cases include [[Fictitious Artist|fictitious artists]], [[Style/Unknown and untitled/Special purpose artist|special purpose artists]] and miscellaneous people such as graphic designers or illustrators that are added to the database an an "artist" in order to credit them for their work.
An artist is generally a musician, group of musicians, a collaboration of multiple musicians or other music professional contributing to the works described in the [[MusicBrainz Database]]. As the [[MusicBrainz]] project evolves, so does the definition of "artist", so that now the artist table is used to hold everything up to music industry lawyers (see [[Miscellaneous Production Relationship Type]]). In general, however, artists are people who sing or play instruments.

There are various examples of unusual artists documented under [[Artist Name|Artist Name]]. See also the list of [[Fictitious Artist]]s (which are also considered valid, separate artists in MusicBrainz) and [[Special Purpose Artist]]s.

Of course, the most interesting thing about any artist is which [[Release]]s they've made. Each release has a [[Release Artist]] and [[Track]]s with [[Track Artist]]s.


== Examples ==
== Examples ==
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See the [[Annotation|page about annotations]] for more information.
See the [[Annotation|page about annotations]] for more information.


== Additional information ==

* [[How to Add an Artist|How to add an artist]]
==Editing artists==
* [[How to Use Artist Credits|How to use artist credits]]

* [[How to Split Artists|How to split artists]]
Any [[MusicBrainz]] user can edit artists in several ways:
* [[How To Merge Artists|How to merge artists]]
* The system provides the following [[Edit Type]]s:
** [[Merge Artists Edit]]
** [[Edit Artist Name Edit]]

==How To==

Beginners may also find interest in the following [[How To]]s:
* [[How To Split Artists]]
* [[How To Merge Artists]]


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{{ArtistFooter}}

Revision as of 20:40, 22 March 2012

Template:DocumentationHeader An artist is generally a musician, group of musicians, a collaboration of multiple musicians or other music professional contributing to the works described in the MusicBrainz Database. In other words, artists are usually people who sing or play instruments.

Special cases include fictitious artists, special purpose artists and miscellaneous people such as graphic designers or illustrators that are added to the database an an "artist" in order to credit them for their work.

Examples

Style guidelines

Please see the guidelines for artists.

Artist properties

Name

The artist name is the official name of an artist, be it a person or a band. In most cases it's the name as found on the liner.

For people, the name can either be a legal name or a performance name. When both are in the database, they can be linked together using the performance name relationship.

Legal name
A legal name is the name of a person as used in official situations such as government dealings. This is usually the name which would be found on a birth certificate, although legal names can be changed, e.g. through marriage or by deed poll. Bands do not have legal names.
Performance name
A performance name is an alias used by a person for marketing or other reasons. A person may use several performance names and may also release material under their legal name.

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".

Type

The type is used to explicitly state whether an artist is a person or group.

Gender

The gender is used to explicitly state whether a person identifies as male, female or neither. Groups do not have genders.

Country

The artist country, as the name suggests, stores the country with which an artist is primarily identified with. It does not necessarily have to be the birth 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 alternate names for an artist, which currently have two main functions: localised names and search hints. Localised names are used to store the official names used in different languages and countries. These use the locale field to identify which language or country the name is for. Search hints are used to help both users and the server when searching and can be a number of things including alternate names, nicknames or even misspellings. For more information and examples, see the guidelines for 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.

Additional information

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