Artist

An artist is generally a musician (or musician persona), 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

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.

Person
This indicates an individual person.
Group
This indicates a group of people that may or may not have a distinctive name.
Orchestra
This indicates an orchestra (a large instrumental ensemble).
Choir
This indicates a choir/chorus (a large vocal ensemble).
Character
This indicates an individual fictional character.
Other
Anything which does not fit into the above categories.

Note that not every ensemble related to classical music is an orchestra or choir. The Borodin Quartet and The Hilliard Ensemble, for example, are simply groups.

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

The begin and end dates indicate when an artist started and finished its existence. Its exact meaning depends on the type of artist:

For a person
Begin date represents date of birth, and end date represents date of death.
For a group (or orchestra/choir)
Begin date represents the date the group first formed, and the end date represents the date when the group last dissolved.
For a character
Begin date represents the date (in real life) when the character concept was created. The end date should not be set. These fields do not hold fictional birth and death dates.
For others
These fields are currently undefined for artists of the type Other.

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.

ISNI code

The International Standard Name Identifier for the artist. See ISNI for more information.

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.

Additional information