Comment 2 for bug 1377510

Mediascanner will set "albumArtist" to "artist" if the file doesn't provide this metadata explicitly. So this field should always be available for tracks that at least have artist set.

If you want to provide an album oriented UI, you can do so as follows:

 1. on your ArtistsModel, set albumArtists=true. This will give you a list of album artists rather than track artists.
 2. on your AlbumsModel, set albumArtist instead of artist to restrict it to that album artist.

If your various artists albums have been tagged correctly, then they should show up once. This will also handle cases where the album artist isn't set to the generic name "Various Artists" (e.g. http://musicbrainz.org/release/413397ba-d40d-3e30-b48a-3cabee0c5fc2).