Music Industry Innovation: Meta Data
Just as long as music has been released for consumption, there have been procedures in place to acknowledge the parties involved in a song’s creation. Traditionally this information is solely used to issue royalties to music creators. In the late 1870s, Thomas Edison created the first iteration of the phonograph. In 1880 Alexander Graham Bell revamped the phonograph by inventing the graphophone. This music player with the added ability to record sound became the inspiration for cassette recording boomboxes in the late 1970s. In the heyday of the graphophone, the standard methods of metadata collection were spoken introductions and sticker annotations on a piece of paper. Moving forward to 1930 we saw the introduction of LPs by RCA Victor; eventually to be renamed RCA Records, and in 1948 Dr. Peter Goldmark and Columbia Records revamped the vinyl disk by increasing playtimes to two minutes as opposed to the potential minute of a cylinder phonograph. During this era in music we also saw the introduction of large gatefold liner notes with artwork and lyrics; as the preferred method of metadata collection. This led to what is now commonly known as an album booklet for CD’s beginning in the early 1980s containing photos, lyrics, thank you notes and a list of all parties who contributed to each song. Now with the current advancement of digital albums, consumers are provided with digital album booklets that continue the trend of information included in LP’s and CD’s but don’t require physical output.
In the music industry, Meta Data typically focuses on audio recording and refers to, the name of the recording artist, songwriter(s), producer(s), musicians, audio engineer(s), recording studio, etc. This information notifies companies like ASCAP and BMI who handle music publishing, of the proper parties to issue payment and ownership rights whenever their creative intelligence (in the form of song) is used (be it in a video, movie, concert, radio program, commercial, karaoke machine, etc.). Metadata in its more historic forms has always been an integral part of music intellectual property ownership documentation. In the ’80s and ’90s cracking the plastic on a CD for the first time and reading the liner notes in an album booklet was nostalgic (ahhh fond memories).
However, with the dawn of the Big Data Age, metadata now also helps music companies like Apple Music and Tidal determine what music and other content to target to their listeners. Today the favorite that a consumer makes on any given song in a streaming platform, triggers metadata to prompt suggestions of additional content they may enjoy. This new execution made it possible to compose a uniquely curated library of music for their customers directly from their catalogs or indirectly through a relationship with radio networks; who direct traffic to these entities for customers who are interested in purchasing a song they’ve heard.
Apple Music and Tidal are currently the two primary monopolies of music streaming in the music industry aside from Pandora and Spotify.
Apple Music allows consumers to have access to over thirty million songs, so they can explore all of their musical interests and the recommendations from Apple based on the content they favorite and view with a membership. Consumers can also communicate with the artists they’re fans of with comments and actions on the artist’s live posts. Apple Music additionally offers its own 24 hours, 7 days a week radio service which introduces customers to a variety of music, shows, and other content they can purchase within the program. Furthermore, this facet of Apple Inc. has a relationship with radio stations where recognizable tags are placed in songs metadata; embedded with iTunes coding so that a query of the song in apps like SoundHound, Shazam and players like Pandora and Spotify will populate a result in the iTunes store for the potential purchase of the music.
On the Tidal platform, consumers enjoy a similar thirty million songs and relationships with radio through metadata tags using, artist names, lyrics, and sounds from production; like Apple Music. However, the draw of this flagship is that the owners of the company are artists, writers, and producers of music. This enables them to show more concern and compassion for those with creative rights being properly compensated for their work, whenever streamed through their servers. At Tidal an artist, writer or producer, earns a higher percentage of profit through the metadata tags when their content is consumed, compared to other companies like Apple who focus the profit margin on the streaming company itself. Other benefits of Tidal for consumers are the access to exclusive content from the creative individuals that are not available on any other platform or early release exclusivity, streaming of large ticket items concerts and boxing matches, and the purchase or winning of tickets to shows.
Unfortunately, while radio tagging seems to be working very well to direct consumers to music purchase portals, the systems in place to process who is responsible for creating each song played, do not always have the proper information to guarantee that all worthy parties receive royalty payments. Surprisingly, the logging of this information was more accurate when everything was manually notated and funneled through a select group of specialists. In this digital age, where technology streamlines all of our processes, the quality of collecting and organizing relevant data in the music industry has been lost. The main culprits causing incorrect information are, name misspellings, performer name changes, content having multiple release dates, and content being released under different artists presenting a conflict in ownership to the data analysis tools.
All of these issues result in a loss of potential sales, missed promotion opportunities to consumers, and miss-distributed or undistributed royalties to deserving parties. Some artists have experienced piracy as a result of the inconsistencies in digital music metadata, causing the need to pull content from streaming services and other platforms. In turn, customers then can’t enjoy or purchase the content either. Currently, there are 350 digital music providers, and each is monitoring its systems and security. The industry as a whole is at a loss financially due to each company independently create its metadata solution. NARM suggests that digital music and streaming providers should come together and create one unified system for metadata collection, analysis, and output to lower expenses and increase product output and ultimately, economic growth. Likely this will be executed when the Global Repertoire Database is accepted as the standard for metadata functioning in the music industry. It will compare duplicate entries and those that belong to the same artist under different names to ensure that ownership is put in the proper places. This will raise the accuracy of royalty payments, and the content catalogs of creative the customers see in their queries, in addition to standard cataloging and analysis.
