I'm not sure that it is true that songwriters on sources are only credited with initials as first name. But I guess when you index an artist field you could check if they are of type person and the index the first name as an initial, this would then allow searching by initial.

Is this a good idea, I dont know ?

It might make sense to do this in the actual database as automatic aliases, but not sure.

Paul Taylor says: "I'm not sure that it is true that songwriters on sources are only credited with initials as first name."
The main source I use when I add a release is its booklet. And 90% of booklets I used mention only the last names of songwriters (with initials or even without ones). When an initial(s) is(are) present, it is absolutely useless for MB searching, but it would be helpful, if the search engine would consider the initial as first letter of first/middle name.

Very, very common in, for example, the old Melodiya releases I've been looking at lately when adding Estonian stuff. I'm starting to agree more with the usefulness of this. How much work would it be / how much more annoying it would be for indexing?

I have a solution that I'm happy to implement if you think it makes sense:

At Indexing time of the artist index if the artist type is person and the artist name is in latin script add the first letter of the first name to the aliasfield, i.e Kate Bush add alias k. Bush

Then at searching time you can do a search for K Bush and it will find it. In basic search artist ad alias are both searched by default anyway.

Hmm, I'd add a second constraint, the sortname being in the format "XXXX, YYYY" (to weed out as many performance names as we can). And this could perfectly apply to Cyrillic too.

Would searching for a comma suffice ?
What is the equivalet of a comma in cyrillic ?

Well, sortnames are all Latin, so it wouldn't change. But that reminded me that sortnames will be latin while the name won't so yeah, maybe better to do it just with Latin for now

Fixed for latin as discussed.