Feature request: album artist =/= song artist, and how it could affect the database

[lapagen]

(The following has no relation to covers. Those are isolated cases.)

Ok, get ready, as it's not a simple request.

"Scrobblers" should tell the difference between an album artist and a track artist, or if an album is a compilation. Of course, it could be corrected by the community in some way we can discuss later if this suggestion gets approved.

We could then have a division in the Artists>Albums subpages of user libraries, "Albums" and "Also featured on" (like Spotify has an "Appears on" section). If so, we should decide on a more appropriate name than "also featured on."

If the album is just a compilation and not a mix, things are easy. Counters should be updated for the artists of the "scrobbled" tracks. Things can get harder with DJ mixes for example. They're somehow a little bit like covers, so the scrobbles shouldn't be only attributed to the original artists, and mistaggings happen frequently enough so that some songs end up being popularly wrongly credited to the DJ as a result, which messes up the database of a site like Wilt if anything else (we get more versions of the same because of various tags). The following idea should also make auto-correction/merging easier (=/= simpler, yeah...) in the long run and minimize the mess.

I believe it's possible to make counters go up for the album artist and the artists of the played songs, but there needs to be information about that in the library. For example:

• On the album artist's page of user libraries, the songs from said album appear just like his own songs, except there's a mention of the original artists (in the form of brackets, smaller font, or anything else). Eventually, another idea is to separate his songs from the ones in his mixes into two columns.
• On the original artist's page of user libraries, the song appears just like any other in the song list, but the artist also gets a "Also featured on" (name subject to change) section. The album should be mentioned in the song subpage of one's library anyway (just like it's done on lastfm right now: you can see when you scrobbled a particular song and what album it was on).

After that, the counters of said DJ's can be cut into his own songs and mix tracks, for example by hovering with one's mouse over the number, or under a "Details" button. We could also have the choice (some button/settings) whether to count all tracks or not in user toplists. In a similar way, we could have the choice whether to include all tracks in toplists on artist profiles. This may be only possible if the previous ideas get executed and prevents wrongly credited songs from ending up there without it being attributed to the actual artist, plus adds to the count for the correctly tagged song (the one with the original artist).

(I'll leave it like that for now, as I've forgotten my other ideas and corrections while writing...)

[ModalSeoul]

We can only do this if the service we're scrobbling from supports such tags.

[Hypsicratea]

Last.fm should support both, as you can see with this album by Juan Atkins, the individual songs are each by a different artist. http://www.last.fm/music/Juan+Atkins/20+Years+Metroplex+(1985-2005)