This should work now:
https://getmusicbee.com/patches/MusicBee34_Patched.zip
unzip and replace the existing musicbee application files
$Count(<album>) counts the number of files in the same album
$Count(<album>, <album artist>) counts the number of albums for an album artist
$Sum(<play count>, <album>) sums the total play count for all tracks in an album
$Sum(<play count>, <album artist>) sums the total play count for all tracks by an album artist
Thanks a lot for the quick fix! This works great and does just what I want.
I'm seeing the count is a bit off for a few artists however, including the actual value shown in Music Explorer now that I'm looking more closely at it, and I'm not sure why. Do you have any ideas as to why that may be? It's still good to be able to have the artist play count with ballpark accuracy, but it's kinda weird to go from 2-3 off to over 100 (eg. Jonathan Young shows 338 scrobbles on last.fm, but the music explorer reports 437. I don't have any duplicate files for this artist.)
EDIT before even submitting the post:
Looks like the cause is that it's counting instances of the artist name that appear with multiple artists. Such as Jonathan Young & Galactikraken having 6 plays will add 6 plays to Jonathan Young. The album artist tag is Jonathan Young while the artist tags are Jonathan Young & Galactikraken.
I've added all instances of "Jonathan Young & additional artist" and it got me to 101, resulting in the 437 count (which is still off by 2 but that's probably due to a song or two not being in my library)
While this is cool, and I actually do prefer this and wish that last.fm also counted like this, is it at all possible to simply get the count of the artist name on its own, not including any instances of the artist being credited with additional artists in the artist/album artist tag?
EDIT after submitting post:
Oh, duh, I can just use <artist> instead of <album artist>. Excuse my last question haha. Looks like everything's good then!