[ronie]

Thanks for the explanation ronie!

Wouldn't it make more sense to pull the "Artist" ID3 tag though? Say a compilation album features 12 artists. If I played that album from beginning to end I'd like the fanart of each artist to display rather than some generic "Various Artists" fanart. I can't think of any way to alter the folder structure to accommodate this either.

both ways have their pros and cons.
neither one will work 100% in all cases.

extrafanart is not natively supported by xbmc, it's a skin 'hack' to make it possible anyway.
those workarounds will never be perfect :-)

i prefer the current way, as it will work out-of-the-box.
if i use the artist tag way, the user would need to set up the path to their music folder first.