metaedit

0005. Related artists live in our DB only, never written to Jellyfin

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-10-06

Context

artist.getSimilar returns a ranked, scored list of similar artists. Jellyfin’s BaseItemDto has no related-artist field on MusicArtist. The writable fields that could superficially carry the data are Tags (free-form strings), ExternalUrls, and People with PersonKind.Artist.

Decision

Store similar artists in lastfm_similarity, in our own database, with the match score and rank. Do not write them to Jellyfin in any form.

Consequences

• Zero pollution of the tag namespace and zero risk of corrupting the cast/credit list (People is also used by Jellyfin’s credit-completion logic).
• Full fidelity: name, MBID, match score and rank are all preserved, none of which a tag string could express.
• The data is visible in this tool’s related-artists panel and archive explorer, and queryable offline, but not in Jellyfin clients. This is a stated limitation, not an oversight.
• If a future Jellyfin version exposes a structured similar-artists field, the data is already there to populate it.

Alternatives rejected

• Tag prefix such as similar-artist:Radiohead. Rejected by the operator. It would survive in Jellyfin and be queryable via GET /Items?tags=, at the cost of tag-namespace pollution.
• Bidirectional People entries. Rejected: it overloads a field that means “credited person” and can mislead credit completion.
• ExternalUrls only. Rejected: it records a link, not a relationship, and cannot express ordering or similarity.