Ooops, this is about artist IDs, not names, sorry. There has been some discussion on http://tickets.musicbrainz.org/browse/PICARD-199 recently that seems like the main blocker for using release types to determine whether something is a compilation (iTunes and apple devices) now behave in a way that would allow us to do the right thing™ and use release types. I'll leave comment over there pointing to this pull request.