It'd be nice to be able to add or edit ARs within the RE, but that's not this ticket.

It seems that, with the addition of a single dropdown somewhere on the RE pages (perhaps by the edit note), we could very easily improve the number of releases with at least one of the basic ARs - composer, performer, or "writer" - by a huge percentage, with very little effort.

Just add a drop down with four options:
This release uses:

• Performer as artist (default for add release?)
• Composer as artist
• Writer as artist (show only if audiobook is the release type, and then make it the default?)
• Do not add ARs: A mix of artist styles is used (default for edit release?)

The option chosen doesn't even need to be saved anywhere in the database (indeed, that could even be useful, if the composer(s) and performer(s) are the same - now you'd get 2 ARs for next to no effort). But it would give the server that one last bit of info needed so that, after the release is created (or as part of the edit release's edits), an add performer/composer/writer AR edit could be auto-created by the server, using the artist info already in the release.

This would definitely make adding the performer or composer AR to VA releases significantly simpler, and would allow releases to start, right from the first moment, with at least those basic ARs set.

Further down the road, perhaps these particular ARs could even be tied to the add release edit (or some package of the edit release's edits?), so they would automatically pass if/when that add release edit passed, rather than them being added into the queue. (Presumably, if the release has the artists set right, the ARs are right, and vica versa.)