Metadata is the biggest little problem plaguing the music industry

By Dani Deahl@danideahl May 29, 2019,

Recently, a musician signed to a major indie label told me they were owed up to $40,000 in song royalties they would never be able to collect. It wasn’t that they had missed out on payments for a single song — it was that they had missed out on payments for 70 songs, going back at least six years.

The problem, they said, was metadata. In the music world, metadata most commonly refers to the song credits you see on services like Spotify or Apple Music, but it also includes all the underlying information tied to a released song or album, including titles, songwriter and producer names, the publisher(s), the record label, and more. That information needs to be synchronized across all kinds of industry databases to make sure that when you play a song, the right people are identified and paid. And often, they aren’t.

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Entering the correct information about a song sounds like it should be easy enough, but metadata problems have plagued the music industry for decades. Not only are there no standards for how music metadata is collected or displayed, there’s no need to verify the accuracy of a song’s metadata before it gets released, and there’s no one place where music metadata is stored. Instead, fractions of that data is kept in hundreds of different places across the world.

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It’s critical that metadata is distributed and entered accurately, not just for a song or album’s discoverability, but because metadata helps direct money to all the folks who made that music when a song is played, purchased, or licensed. Documenting everyone’s work is also important because, “That attribution could be how someone gets their next gig,” says Joshua Jackson, who leads business development for Jaxsta, an Australian company that authenticates music information.

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It’s possible to correct metadata errors afterward, but that’s reliant on someone catching that error and then correcting it in every database where it appears. Even if it does get fixed, that doesn’t mean an artist gets all the payments they’re due — every company and collection society has different rules about how long they hold on to unclaimed royalties. The musician who was owed $40,000 missed out because a glitch between two databases removed many of his credits. It wasn’t the musician’s fault, but too much time had gone by before anyone noticed. The companies involved declined to pay him.

“We take it for granted that we can look up movie or TV credits on IMDb and see everything, down to production assistants,” says Jackson, who recently hosted a standing-room-only panel on metadata at the Music Biz 2019 conference in Nashville. “But the changes to music metadata and the standards are so slow.”

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