Basically artists that you like a couple of tracks of each album but dont like enough to buy all their work so you would appreciate all their best songs on a single CD without having to trawl through the shit.
Personally I would really appreciate a Best Of Metronomy. As I love a lot of their tracks (The Look, The Bay, On Dancefloors, Love Letters, and loads more) but find a lot of their albums very hit and miss.
Someone on the old forums wrote down what Kanye West’s greatest hits would look like if it was purely the singles that he released in order, and that was pretty tasty. Replace the few did singles and replace them with album highlights and I think that’s the one.
However he has a number of excellent albums so maybe he doesn’t really fit the OP criteria…
A TF greatest hits album was released in 2003, which means it misses out their 3 most recent albums, (which means no Baby Lee, unfortunately). It’s tracklisting is pretty decent however, so it’s a good starting point.
I was actually toying with the idea of self-making three separate Teenage Fanclub greatest hits albums - one with songs written by Norman Blake, one with just songs written by Gerry Love, and one with only songs written by Raymond McGinley. One of them has ended up being a little bit harder to choose a tracklisting for that the others however.