Legal Name of a Person

A Legal Name is the name of a person as used in official dealings, especially with governments. Many musicians are known by an alias, and we refer to that as the PerformanceName.

For MusicBrainz purposes, if an artist works under their PerformanceName, the Legal Name is primarily used to hold PerformanceNameRelationshipType to PerformanceNames, and biographical details such as personal relationships.

The birth certificate is the usual place you will find a legal name. However, legal names can be changed at any time (eg by marriage, deed poll etc).

Style

SameArtistWithDifferentNames contains details about how and when to use both PerformanceNames and LegalNames.
Note that only persons have LegalNames, not bands.

Examples

Declan Patrick MacManus is the Legal Name of Elvis Costello.

Paul David Hewson is the Legal Name of Bono.

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

WikiDoc

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