I haven't found this issue reported before so apologies if I am creating a duplicate one.

The issue happens when you are either creating a Various Artists release or if you remove the artist from the AC and click the "Edit" button to enter the AC bubble while it is empty. I have created an imgur album to illustrate the situation and am adding the reproduction steps below. You can see the album here: https://imgur.com/a/19teqRP.

I am creating a test release where my example track has been already added to mb as a single (I will not be submitting any edits). In the first image you can see that I have added 2 tracks with the exact same title, AC and duration. In the second image I have demonstrated that both tracks are already matching the existing recording. In third image, I have went back to the "Tracklist" tab where I have selected the "Artist" value, removed it and clicked on the "Edit" button while the "Artist" value remained empty (I have managed to reproduce it with or without focus on the "Artist" field with about 50% reproduction rate). In the fourth image, I have entered the artist (can be either typed in manually or selected from the drop-down box). Here is where this bug occurs. As you can see, the field "credited as" has remained empty and will not be filled in when you click on "Done". In the last image I am showing that the release editor thinks this is a different AC and offers you to change the AC on the recording. The check-mark will not do anything as this AC is identical and won't be changing anything (at least nothing is shown in the edit preview).

What is interesting is that the empty AC shows the artist's disambiguation meanwhile the correct AC does not. I am also aware that there is another artist with the same name but no, I have not picked the other artist by accident. I have tested this bug with the very same artist (https://musicbrainz.org/artist/47b4b80b-0cfd-4dfa-98bb-4ca24ba2b418). I wonder how many artists exists in db which do not have the "credited as" field filled with any value.

What is also interesting is that instead of leaving the "credited as" field blank, in the third image if I typed in something to the field and then pressed the "Edit" button, the "credited as" value would stay as the same text for any artist I would have picked from the search (even when cycling though multiple artists one after another). This might be intended although I remember this not being the case in the past, e.g. if you had "artist1 feat. artist2" entered, you were able to press the "Edit" button and select both artists + join phrase and the "credited as" value would change to the first artist's name automatically, but now the "artist1 feat. artist2" value stays in the first artist's "credited as" field unless you change it manually or remove it.

If this is a duplicate ticket feel free to close it and if you can't reproduce it then let me know and I will try to provide more information. This issue happened to me on Chrome.

Thanks a lot!