Artists entry in Music Items

I was wondering what everyones preference is, as far as listing the Artist for Music Items where there are more than one artist. As in compilations, soundtracks, splits, etc.

I like to have all of the artists entered for a given item so that I can see any and all tracks by an artist at once in list view, which you can't with the stolid "Various Artists". This also helps me find smaller artists who may have only appeared (or eep! even recorded) once on a sampler or some other such nonsense.

I'd prefer not to enter the artists for this again!

Personally? Various Artists. A number of compilations I own have so many tracks that you couldn't fit all the artists on anyway, and it just clutters my artists listings up too much (600+ artists on Winamp vs 200 odd on here!)

There is an argument either way to be fair though - just my preference.

Admittedly, its not very aesthetically pleasing. But it doesn't list every single artist, only the first 2 or 3. But I've found that functionally, this works much better than merely adding Track #, Track Name - Track Artist to the description of a music item, this actually links up to the artist profile.

It does on the My Artists view - www.listal.com/artists/music :o)

Indeed, the album also then appears on each artist's items list as well - www.listal.com/artist/blur - with popular compilations then superceeding that artist's own work. Trainspotting isn't a Blur album by any measure of the imagination. In Sleeper's case, it comes listed as their most popular release over anything they've actually done!

Really, to implement this it wants to be done in a similar way to MusicBrainz, so albums can be marked as V/A, and then displayed in a similar, but slightly different way so as to not get too mixed in with an artist's own releases.