Recently I’ve had two occasions to think about how to typeset musical artist names when next to their album release names. I couldn’t find a very authoritative source on the subject, so I’ll offer up my own findings.

For music-related documents and user interfaces, you may sometimes need display an artist and album title next to each other. What are reasonable choices for separators? Publications like Pitchfork and applications like Bandcamp, Spotify, and Tidal try to side-step this issue by avoiding interface components where these two elements are displayed next to each other. They instead prefer to put one above the other on separate lines. That’s a reasonable solution, but let’s pretend it’s a luxury we don’t have.

Maybe the simplest solution would be to use different font styles for the artist and album:

Lizzy Mercier Desclaux Mambo Nassau

Let’s pretend we don’t have this luxury and that we must reach for typesetting separator-characters.

If we want to optimize for easy authorship, we could use colons:

Lizzy Mercier Desclaux: Mambo Nassau

However, colons sometimes appear in album titles. Especially if you’re attempting to present artist and album titles across many or all musical genres, this might not be the best choice. For some genres, like classical and contemporary art music recordings, colons might even create ambiguity (or readability issues) about which part is the album and which part is the artist:

Chen Pi-Hsien: Messiaen: 20 Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, I-27

There are other simple separators like commas and slashes that share this ambiguity problem. So we want to optimize for disambiguation, using an en- or em-dash seems to be safer, at least for now, in 2025:

Lizzy Mercier Desclaux – Mambo Nassau

Chen Pi-Hsien – Messiaen: 20 Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, I-27

Using dashes is also good enough for NME, iTunes, Apple Music, and Discogs to separate artist names from album titles, if that means anything to you. It does to me. Except in situations where sub-pixel real estate matters, dashes look good, are good disambiguators, and should be renderable by any font that’s any good.

If you’re considering using a hyphen instead of a dash: please don’t. Hyphens frequently appear in human names and album titles, and would not be a good separator or a smart disambiguator. I’ll admit that even dashes are an unusual separator character. But since they appear so infrequently in this context, they’re a shoo-in. For more information about the difference between hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes, I recommend the Butterick’s Practical Typography article about hyphens and dashes.