Artist Alias Does Not Link Back to Artist

[PatrickStar 5]

So, like the title says, for a lot of artists that use an "alias" (different name, same artist), Emby seems to add the alias as a new, separate artist instead of associating it with the original artist.

Likewise, instead of showing the complete overview you would expect from the MusicBrainz page, some of the artist's music appears to be missing because it is associated with the alias rather than the correct artist.

Here are some examples:

[PatrickStar 5]

And for Afroman it does list "The Prodigal Son" also for the Artist Joseph Foreman, but when i click on it it reads and links to Afroman. It also shows under Afroman too.
But for "The Land of Thule" by Burzum (NEW) it shows Burzum as Artist, Burzum (NEW) as Album artists and only lists it on the Burzum page as featured on.

[Luke 43402]

Hi, it does by the artist and album artist values embedded in your audio files. How are they tagged ?

[PatrickStar 5]

On 9/15/2026 at 6:38 AM, Luke said:

Hi, it does by the artist and album artist values embedded in your audio files. How are they tagged ?

Sorry for the late reply!

So the album artist is indeed tagged differently, however the MusicBrainz ID is the same as can be seen in the following example:

While this is correct that files have a different Album Artist, i think in the case of an Artist using an "Alias" in the sense of a different "style" of writing their name (or even making a typo) this should be linked to the same artist based on the MusicBrainz ID - so i guess the MusicBrainz ID should take precedence over the pure Album Artist string, as in my opinion the Music Brainz ID is a clear identifier where as the Album Artist string is but a loose convention.
 

Ideally emby server would treat those discrepancies between the tagged MusicBrainz Artist ID and the Album Artist string contents just like MusicBrainz and other Services do: Whenever there is an anchor or navigation-link, the link itself should refer to the MusicBrainz ID but the link text should be based on the Album Artist string.
That way, if Album Artist is different but the ID is same, it is an Alias. If the ID is different, this is intentionally a different artist. If there is no ID, the Album Artist should be treated as the identifier (first match).

Since MusicBrainz seems to be the default datasource encouraging the user to use and also contribute to the database, i think this would be a good default change. Otherwise i think i could simply "script" my Picard to overwrite the Album Artist content with the actual name fetched with the MusicBrainz Artist ID, but then i would lose the information that this Album was released with an Alias.

Is this something that emby could integrate?

[user24 424]

Hi, yeah, these pesky Artists that change their names are a problem! Perhaps not a major one though?

I think my worst 'offender' is Johnny Cougar - John Cougar - John Cougar Mellencamp - John Mellencamp. I ended up just calling him John Mellencamp everywhere and relying on the Album art to see the differences. I could always add original/alias Tags in Emby, or write something in the Overview text for each Album - but I've never bothered. Perhaps, for me,  this is something like 10 Album Artists out of 2000+ at a rough guess.

Not sure if I'm following exactly the whole scenario of what you are describing - wouldn't that group all the alias Person entities under the one common entry, based upon their MusicBrainz ID only, if it's present? (i.e. Album Artist / Artist / Composer). I know others have (similarly) asked for any easy "merge" option previously in old threads.

My preference is that Emby splits on name-string Tags, as it does now, irrespective of a common MusicBrainz ID, because that suits my library organisation. I would hate to have an Emby algorithm making automatic assumptions that I may not want, because of my own specific tagging.

While Emby has made some improvements with Artist / Composer separation, there are still instances where they are combined together. I don't want John Mellencamp (Artist - Performer) fully integrated with John Mellencamp (Composer - Writer) so tag them something like this "John Mellencamp" and "John Mellencamp" respectively. Different names - same MusicBrainz ID and link - separate pages/entries.

So, combining by removing name aliases and splitting on Artist / Composer becomes my choice, via my tagging of the relevant fields... Everyone can presently make their own choices to suit themselves, where a defined Tag takes precedence over a MusicBrainz ID. I guess solution options could potentially be built into the library settings to cover automatic merging or no merging???

Anyway, that's just an example of where implementing a 'fix' for Person aliases could cause other issues elsewhere for different library setups, if a new default method was not optional? Unless I am misunderstanding exactly what you're describing? Cheers!

Edited September 24 by user24

[PatrickStar 5]

On 9/24/2026 at 5:48 AM, user24 said:

Hi, yeah, these pesky Artists that change their names are a problem! Perhaps not a major one though?

I think my worst 'offender' is Johnny Cougar - John Cougar - John Cougar Mellencamp - John Mellencamp. I ended up just calling him John Mellencamp everywhere and relying on the Album art to see the differences. I could always add original/alias Tags in Emby, or write something in the Overview text for each Album - but I've never bothered. Perhaps, for me,  this is something like 10 Album Artists out of 2000+ at a rough guess.

Not sure if I'm following exactly the whole scenario of what you are describing - wouldn't that group all the alias Person entities under the one common entry, based upon their MusicBrainz ID only, if it's present? (i.e. Album Artist / Artist / Composer). I know others have (similarly) asked for any easy "merge" option previously in old threads.

My preference is that Emby splits on name-string Tags, as it does now, irrespective of a common MusicBrainz ID, because that suits my library organisation. I would hate to have an Emby algorithm making automatic assumptions that I may not want, because of my own specific tagging.

While Emby has made some improvements with Artist / Composer separation, there are still instances where they are combined together. I don't want John Mellencamp (Artist - Performer) fully integrated with John Mellencamp (Composer - Writer) so tag them something like this "John Mellencamp" and "John Mellencamp" respectively. Different names - same MusicBrainz ID and link - separate pages/entries.

So, combining by removing name aliases and splitting on Artist / Composer becomes my choice, via my tagging of the relevant fields... Everyone can presently make their own choices to suit themselves, where a defined Tag takes precedence over a MusicBrainz ID. I guess solution options could potentially be built into the library settings to cover automatic merging or no merging???

Anyway, that's just an example of where implementing a 'fix' for Person aliases could cause other issues elsewhere for different library setups, if a new default method was not optional? Unless I am misunderstanding exactly what you're describing? Cheers!

Would that not be reflected in the database i.e. be listed as either album artist, artist or composer? 

What i am suggesting is that aliases act like aliases, so the "Burzum (NEW)" album should display a link to "Burzum" but read "Burzum (NEW)", like so:

<a href="/link/to/Burzum">Burzum (NEW)</a>

instead of

<a href="/link/to/Burzum (NEW)">Burzum (NEW)</a>

To me it looks very "bootlegish" to have the same artist multiple times with a bit of the discography here and a bit there. On spotify, you click the artist and it is all there - same as on MuiscBrainz from where the data is fetched. I would love to see the same in emby.

[user24 424]

Hey, so just to confirm what you want to achieve, something like:

"Burzum" and "Burzum (NEW)" and "Burzum NEW" still showing as separate Album Artists on the main Emby page that shows all of the entities together. So you see the aliases. These three next to each other in the standard primary grid view:

AND when you select any of these:

They all link to the one Album Artist detail page that shows the one overview, but all of the Albums for the three entities all show together on that one detail page as a combined discography. But with the individual Album tracks still only containing the one relevant Artist alias?

If that's the scenario (and please correct me if I'm wrong) then I may have a tentative idea that might achieve this for you.

I've just run a mini-test and I think it's possible, but just need to confirm with you and do a bit more playing around with it...

[user24 424]

Oh, and if you can please share the screenshots of what you see on the three detail pages for the three Burzum entities now, that would be useful... I'm genuinely trying to solve this for you...

Edited September 27 by user24

[PatrickStar 5]

On 9/27/2026 at 12:50 AM, user24 said:

Hey, so just to confirm what you want to achieve, something like:

"Burzum" and "Burzum (NEW)" and "Burzum NEW" still showing as separate Album Artists on the main Emby page that shows all of the entities together. So you see the aliases. These three next to each other in the standard primary grid view:

AND when you select any of these:

They all link to the one Album Artist detail page that shows the one overview, but all of the Albums for the three entities all show together on that one detail page as a combined discography. But with the individual Album tracks still only containing the one relevant Artist alias?

If that's the scenario (and please correct me if I'm wrong) then I may have a tentative idea that might achieve this for you.

I've just run a mini-test and I think it's possible, but just need to confirm with you and do a bit more playing around with it...

No, i dont need Aliases as seperate album artists. I want album artists, not Album Aliases. The main Alias is an alias too.
If there is an alias on an album write it on that album, but lik to the actual artist. 

The detail pages each have different music, its not shared, just like different artists.



Thats an edge case where it shows "included in" on the artist page, since you can see the album artist and song artist is different.

All i want is in this very detail view of an album to write the alias (as it does) and link to the main artist. dont create new artists for the alias, omit whenever it is possible, write it out where it belongs: to the album.

I would suggest looking at the music brainz website and how artists and aliases work there because i feel that would clarify a lot. aliases belong into the data model imo.

Edit: Click the link and then open the "Burzum (NEW)" from the Release and "Burzum" from any of the songs in a new tab, compare the URL. 
https://musicbrainz.org/release/89761b61-a19e-40d1-8309-a67ecfd2800c/disc/1#disc1

I dont think i can explain it any simpler.

Edited October 9 by PatrickStar

[user24 424]

On 10/10/2026 at 1:36 AM, PatrickStar said:

All i want is in this very detail view of an album to write the alias (as it does) and link to the main artist. dont create new artists for the alias, omit whenever it is possible, write it out where it belongs: to the album.

I don't know of any easy way to achieve exactly what you want, but here's a potential workaround that may at least group all of the Album Artist Albums together for all of the aliases, while still retaining the aliases for the individual Albums...

Emby will import multiple Tags for the Album Artist field, so you could leave the Album Artist alias (as you already have it now) and add the "main" Artist as an additional Album Artist across all of the different alias Albums. Then your Album page will link back to your complete Album Artist discography in Emby, via the combined Album Artist entity.

I'm not familiar with this Artist, but you would know if "Burzam" or perhaps "Burzum - Combined" or something else, would be suitable as a combined entity name.

Your example Album page view could look something like this:

An advantage could be that you could have different Album Artists primary images and overviews for the combined entity and the individual alias entities, if you wanted to? I've been testing this for a week, with my own library, and it's not too bad.

A disadvantage could be that there are still several Album Artist entities for the one Artist, when you would prefer to have just one?

Other different combinations of Album Artist / Artist / Composer Tags may give some other page views useful for you???

Anyway, perhaps it's something to test for yourself (if you haven't already) and easy to revert back if it's of no benefit for you. Cheers!