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 43147]

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 409]

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 22 minutes ago by user24