How to automatically create a terms based on each post of a post type

I am working on a music site which has custom post types- 'artists', and 'releases'. I have about 3,000 artists, and about 19,000 Releases in my database. It's been suggested to me that I should create a taxonomy term for each release and each artist to eliminate some slow queries on my site.

Anyway, I know how to create a new taxonomy, and how to make terms by hand. How can I auto create terms in my release taxonomy, where the terms are the names of my release posts?

Thanks!