Let me create artists associated with an album/release BEFORE an album is created

[mjsir911]

hi, if I'm adding a release via harmony that has one or more artists that don't exist on musicbrainz yet, the current workflow is:

• load the release on harmony, add to musicbrainz
• on the tracks page, create a new artist and also check that every auto-located artist is the correct one
• when artists are incorrect or not found, create a new artist via the tracks page (optionally with manually inserted external links?)
• then, create the full release
• then, go back to harmony and open the individual artist link to connect external links together.

if, instead, it's possible to create or merge artists before creating an album, based off of platform artist URLs, , this workflow changes to auto-discovering the correct artist, not having to check the relationship and not depending on auto-artist-search on the track artists.

[kellnerd]

I'm sorry, but I don't want to encourage users of Harmony to create auto-populated new artist entries which are either low quality or outright duplicates.
From the available data we could only seed artist name and external links and Harmony would have to implement a search for existing artists, essentially replicating MB's inline artist search.

It is better for the user to search for the artist on MB (during release import) to avoid duplicates and create new artists "by hand". The artist name will be prefilled by MB anyway and Harmony will then add the external links after the release has been imported, so there is no loss of information.
By forcing the user to manually create the artist during import, we encourage additional research (artist area, disambiguation, social links etc.).

So this issue is a won't fix for me, at least as long as Harmony doesn't have an artist lookup feature in addition to the release lookup.

check that every auto-located artist is the correct one

It is good to hear that you are doing this. Wrongly matched artist entities should be rare (except for artists with common names) since the MBID mapper only assigns an artist MBID if the artist's provider link (e.g. the Spotify artist link) is linked to exactly one MB artist.
So the mapping should only be wrong if someone has added the provider link to the wrong MB artist or if the provider's artist page mixes multiple artists with the same name and it is only linked to one of the corresponding MB pages.