Contributors, artists and writers
Differentiating the various types of contributors and artists
The indirect/musical work contributors are involved in the creation of the abstract work… i.e. the composition
The resource contributors are involved in the creation of the the sound recording or video
Artists are the parties labels grant the primary creative credit to. It may reflect a combination of the actual role they played, their contractual relationship with the label with respect to the content, and branding/marketing concerns
Display Artist on resource level are needed for formal identification of the creation and on release level are influenced by commercial / marketing factors
Display Artist Name is a formatted string, containing a grouping of all Display Artists. It is a provided by the label as a suggestion on how to present the Display Artists to the consumer.
More details on how to use DisplayArtist and DisplayArtistNames can be found here.
"Compound" Artists
Individual artists shall always be communicated in different tags (see info box on the right). This does not include "compound artists" such as "Simon & Garfunkel" (one should list Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel as Resource Contributors, alas).
Various Artists and abnormal spellings
The artist "Various" or "Various Artists" does not allow an end user to find a specific artist – and thus such values should be used sparingly. While they are meaningful on Release level, they are only very seldom appropriate on Resource level.
The same problem arises for artists who chose to use "odd" spellings for their name. Whether it is P!nk (instead of Pink) or TAFKAP instead of Prince, they make it hard for consumers to discover their music.
Role Codes
Before creating a user-defined role code, an implementer is encouraged to investigate whether its role codes are in-line with the separation between direct contributors and indirect contributors. If in doubt, they are encouraged to contact DDEX for advice.
Localisation
There are two ways of "localise" information such as contributor names. One is by using the Release/ResourceDetailsByTerritory and the other is to use several PartyName composite inside a single ResourceContributor element.
The first approach must be used if the data communicated is materially different (e.g. when a band has different names in different territories, e.g. "The Charlatans" are thus called in the UK but are called "The Charlatans UK" in the US).
The second approach shall be used to support translations and transliterations of the same name (e.g. different spellings of Tchaikovsky in Cyrillic and/or Latin scripts). In this case, each PartyName has to be accompanied by an appropriate LanguageAndScriptCode attribute.
One artist with two roles
Whether one party plays two roles or two parties playing one role each makes a big difference: The “one party” samples show one person, John Smith, who played two roles, soloist and producer, during the creation of a sound recording or video. The “two party” samples show two different people, unfortunately both called John Smith, each of which plays one role each. To avoid this confusion, it is recommended to always add a Party ID to any composite describing parties.