8 ms·

Metadata is the biggest little problem plaguing the music industry

89 points by cpeterso 7y ago

Mbaqanga 7y ago
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the label’s metadata is always present and accurate. Labels have been screwing artists for over a century.
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  Having recently dealt with data from music labels, I can sadly assure you that it isn't always accurate. But they get enough money as it is, they're not going to spend extra on internal data hygiene...
- ambicapter 7y ago
  Industry rule #4080: Record company people are shady...[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQT2DfzpCLA&t=2m54s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQT2DfzpCLA&t=2m54s
- alex_c 7y ago
  >the label’s metadata is always present and accurate Based on my tangential experience with this part of the industry... it absolutely is not.
- tmd83 7y ago
  Ohh it's accurate in the sense that it records who is the owner, the record label. On the other hand fixing the artists and others metadata is only needed to pay off others which only reduces their profit. If they needed the correctness for getting paid themselves you can bet anything that the metadata would have been correct.
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    > Ohh it's accurate in the sense that it records who is the owner, the record label. Oh, you'd be amazed...
alexchamberlain 7y ago
I think [MusicBrainz][1] deserves a shout out on this topic. [1]: https://musicbrainz.org/ https://musicbrainz.org/
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  Different kind of metadata, I think; the Verge article seems to be talking about the data that goes to PROs[1] and CMOs[2] which is then used to calculate splits and payments based on data from people like Spotify, Apple Music, etc. ("they had missed out on payments for 70 songs, going back at least six years" is stuff I've seen before w.r.t data just not being sent to the PRO/CMOs from a label.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_rights_organisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_rights_organisatio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_rights_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_rights_management
  - 33degrees 7y ago
    Indeed, MusicBrainz contains the names of songwriters, but not the organisations they belong to
imglorp 7y ago
This seems like a good application for a publicly auditable, immutable data store. Artist can birth a hash of the work into store along with their metadata. Post production steps would build on that record, creating a derivative work with new metadata. Labels, ditto. Distribution contracts go on top of that. When it finally gets a performance, that could be a transaction on top of that. Anyone can follow a performance back to its creators.
- dontbenebby 7y ago
  I know books have ISBN numbers, is there no similar system for CDs? (Or is that model outdated in an age of buying singles on iTunes)
  - 33degrees 7y ago
    Yes, they’re called ISRC ids. But while they’re used to uniquely identify audio recordings, they don’t solve the problem of metadata being wrong or getting stripped during transfers
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    A book is usually a single work attributable to a single author (or a group of authors). And you don't usually stream a book as "let's stream pages 175 to 185" [1] In case of music assigning ISBNs to CDs doesn't really work because people more often than not listen to, stream and broadcast individual tracks. And there's no global ID system for individual tracks. This becomes even more messy when you consider that "Original performance 1983", "remastered 1994", "best of 2003" and "Japanese Christmas Special 2013" are all different tracks (even if it's the same track with the same song), often has different distributors and rights holders, and people will fight to the death defending a particular version :) [1] Audiobooks are a slightly different beast, but they are still much easier to match to an author.
    - dontbenebby 7y ago
      Ah thanks. I (wrongly) assumed tracks also got some kind of ID.
aston 7y ago
This is like when you walk into a super complicated legacy code base and immediately have the one magic architectural change that will simplify everything...once you rewrite it from the ground up. The music metadata situation is pretty bad, but the source of the problem is not really carelessness or greed or avoidance of responsibility (although those are all true). The true source of music metadata complication is the insanely complex copyright regime that music operates under. It's a legacy codebase about a century in the making that is constantly being patched up by congress, mostly by trying to change who is being protected from whom. (Among the folks favored at different times: labels, publishing companies, performing artists, song writing artists, radio stations, streaming music services, live venues, ...). Perfect compliance with these laws is effectively impossible, so everyone is just doing the best they can. And any attempts congress makes to change how things work end up being gigantic legal battles because it's a zero-sum game and the more money in the "right" hands (e.g. these artists being ripped off) is less money in the other "right" hands (e.g. the unprofitable streaming service we all love).
- tialaramex 7y ago
  "Old Town Road" is a useful modern reference for what we could have in a world without Copyright. That sample behind everything is from 34 Ghosts IV, one of the tracks in Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV album. Strictly just pasting it into a song and selling it wasn't legal (presumably after this went viral somebody paid Trent Reznor a bunch of money and put his name in the metadata to avoid nasty legal consequences) but everything up until selling it was legal, all the raw PCM data you'd want to take the samples apart without painfully cutting it out of the entire Ghosts recording was uploaded with the Ghosts I-IV album as CC-NC-BY. This is how our culture was _supposed_ to work if we weren't still trying to find ways to put more money in The Man's pocket.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    Meanwhile, Lou Reed owned 100% of “Can I Kick It?” royalties. So much good art doesn’t get put out because of greed.
    - 7y ago
wrs 7y ago
This is the problem right here: >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. If the people who owe the money overtly don’t care about doing the right thing, which seems to have been the typical attitude since the recorded-entertainment business was invented, who’s going to be able to fix it? Seems like this is working exactly as designed.
- dontbenebby 7y ago
  That's when that artist should tweet the story, along with an admonishment to definitely NOT steal their music "Definitely do NOT pirate this material just because I won't be paid either way, it's still illegal! I cannot be more clear on this to you, my fans who normally pay for my music"
- capkutay 7y ago
  Getting a major record company to just follow through on the payment of a clearly contracted project is a hassle on its own. It's like they just want to weed out paying any musicians who can't afford to have a lawyer follow up.
  - qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
    Music executives are some of the biggest scumbags around. I’m sorry for my harshness, but I’m trying to be polite. They’re very predatory.
    - capkutay 7y ago
      Absolutely. Surprised the music industry hasn't had its own 'Harvey Weinstein' moment because the same stuff happens there.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Even if they cared, it might be very hard. The people in that industry are surprisingly not tech savvy, moreover, often, there's very little they can do about it, or worse, very little access to detailed information themselves.
macspoofing 7y ago
Is this one of the very (very) few cases where blockchain could actually make sense? It sounds like you just need some central store to get (cryptographically verifiable, with revision history) metadata.
- dentemple 7y ago
  Blockchain can't fix bad data entry.
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    We need a template like the spam one for the obvious "this is why blockchain(s) won't help here" suggestions.
    - macspoofing 7y ago
      I'm actually very negative on blockchain - as it is clearly a interesting technology but one that is desperately looking for a problem to solve.
- bitwize 7y ago
  This is, incidentally, Imogen Heap's Next Big Idea: to give each musician a sort of CV of record on the blockchain called a "creative passport", such that when they present the passport to a record label or other business partner, everything they worked on or contributed to is visible and attested to. It's a big idea, and I don't think even she is aware of the various pitfalls (blockchain is energetically expensive and cannot fix bad data on its own), but dreaming big is just how Imogen Heap do and it may call attention to the problem in a way that will bring forth actual solutions to parts of it.
herodotus 7y ago
I wrote a very niche App for people who like Opera. It's most important purpose is to display Opera track listing meta-data correctly. (You can see comparison screen shots at https://ariascribe.com https://ariascribe.com). Along the way, I discovered that, even though the genre "opera" has long been recognized, and even has an official ID3v1 tag (103), I have never ever seen the tag used in CDs or downloads. My App has to figure out whether or not an album in a users collection is an Opera. Should have been trivial. Was in fact hard. Very hard.
throwaway77384 7y ago
Hearing lots of people mention blockchain technologies as a solution here. Enter Passport by Mycelia[0] --- [0]http://myceliaformusic.org/ http://myceliaformusic.org/

89 points by cpeterso 7y ago

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the label’s metadata is always present and accurate. Labels have been screwing artists for over a century.

zimpenfish 7y ago
Having recently dealt with data from music labels, I can sadly assure you that it isn't always accurate. But they get enough money as it is, they're not going to spend extra on internal data hygiene...
ambicapter 7y ago
Industry rule #4080: Record company people are shady...[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQT2DfzpCLA&t=2m54s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQT2DfzpCLA&t=2m54s
alex_c 7y ago
>the label’s metadata is always present and accurate Based on my tangential experience with this part of the industry... it absolutely is not.
tmd83 7y ago
Ohh it's accurate in the sense that it records who is the owner, the record label. On the other hand fixing the artists and others metadata is only needed to pay off others which only reduces their profit. If they needed the correctness for getting paid themselves you can bet anything that the metadata would have been correct.
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  > Ohh it's accurate in the sense that it records who is the owner, the record label. Oh, you'd be amazed...

alexchamberlain 7y ago

I think [MusicBrainz][1] deserves a shout out on this topic. [1]: https://musicbrainz.org/ https://musicbrainz.org/

zimpenfish 7y ago
Different kind of metadata, I think; the Verge article seems to be talking about the data that goes to PROs[1] and CMOs[2] which is then used to calculate splits and payments based on data from people like Spotify, Apple Music, etc. ("they had missed out on payments for 70 songs, going back at least six years" is stuff I've seen before w.r.t data just not being sent to the PRO/CMOs from a label.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_rights_organisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_rights_organisatio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_rights_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_rights_management
- 33degrees 7y ago
  Indeed, MusicBrainz contains the names of songwriters, but not the organisations they belong to

imglorp 7y ago

This seems like a good application for a publicly auditable, immutable data store. Artist can birth a hash of the work into store along with their metadata. Post production steps would build on that record, creating a derivative work with new metadata. Labels, ditto. Distribution contracts go on top of that. When it finally gets a performance, that could be a transaction on top of that. Anyone can follow a performance back to its creators.

dontbenebby 7y ago
I know books have ISBN numbers, is there no similar system for CDs? (Or is that model outdated in an age of buying singles on iTunes)
- 33degrees 7y ago
  Yes, they’re called ISRC ids. But while they’re used to uniquely identify audio recordings, they don’t solve the problem of metadata being wrong or getting stripped during transfers
- dmitriid 7y ago
  A book is usually a single work attributable to a single author (or a group of authors). And you don't usually stream a book as "let's stream pages 175 to 185" [1] In case of music assigning ISBNs to CDs doesn't really work because people more often than not listen to, stream and broadcast individual tracks. And there's no global ID system for individual tracks. This becomes even more messy when you consider that "Original performance 1983", "remastered 1994", "best of 2003" and "Japanese Christmas Special 2013" are all different tracks (even if it's the same track with the same song), often has different distributors and rights holders, and people will fight to the death defending a particular version :) [1] Audiobooks are a slightly different beast, but they are still much easier to match to an author.
  - dontbenebby 7y ago
    Ah thanks. I (wrongly) assumed tracks also got some kind of ID.

aston 7y ago

This is like when you walk into a super complicated legacy code base and immediately have the one magic architectural change that will simplify everything...once you rewrite it from the ground up. The music metadata situation is pretty bad, but the source of the problem is not really carelessness or greed or avoidance of responsibility (although those are all true). The true source of music metadata complication is the insanely complex copyright regime that music operates under. It's a legacy codebase about a century in the making that is constantly being patched up by congress, mostly by trying to change who is being protected from whom. (Among the folks favored at different times: labels, publishing companies, performing artists, song writing artists, radio stations, streaming music services, live venues, ...). Perfect compliance with these laws is effectively impossible, so everyone is just doing the best they can. And any attempts congress makes to change how things work end up being gigantic legal battles because it's a zero-sum game and the more money in the "right" hands (e.g. these artists being ripped off) is less money in the other "right" hands (e.g. the unprofitable streaming service we all love).

tialaramex 7y ago
"Old Town Road" is a useful modern reference for what we could have in a world without Copyright. That sample behind everything is from 34 Ghosts IV, one of the tracks in Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV album. Strictly just pasting it into a song and selling it wasn't legal (presumably after this went viral somebody paid Trent Reznor a bunch of money and put his name in the metadata to avoid nasty legal consequences) but everything up until selling it was legal, all the raw PCM data you'd want to take the samples apart without painfully cutting it out of the entire Ghosts recording was uploaded with the Ghosts I-IV album as CC-NC-BY. This is how our culture was _supposed_ to work if we weren't still trying to find ways to put more money in The Man's pocket.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Meanwhile, Lou Reed owned 100% of “Can I Kick It?” royalties. So much good art doesn’t get put out because of greed.
  - 7y ago

wrs 7y ago

This is the problem right here: >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. If the people who owe the money overtly don’t care about doing the right thing, which seems to have been the typical attitude since the recorded-entertainment business was invented, who’s going to be able to fix it? Seems like this is working exactly as designed.

dontbenebby 7y ago
That's when that artist should tweet the story, along with an admonishment to definitely NOT steal their music "Definitely do NOT pirate this material just because I won't be paid either way, it's still illegal! I cannot be more clear on this to you, my fans who normally pay for my music"
capkutay 7y ago
Getting a major record company to just follow through on the payment of a clearly contracted project is a hassle on its own. It's like they just want to weed out paying any musicians who can't afford to have a lawyer follow up.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
  Music executives are some of the biggest scumbags around. I’m sorry for my harshness, but I’m trying to be polite. They’re very predatory.
  - capkutay 7y ago
    Absolutely. Surprised the music industry hasn't had its own 'Harvey Weinstein' moment because the same stuff happens there.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
Even if they cared, it might be very hard. The people in that industry are surprisingly not tech savvy, moreover, often, there's very little they can do about it, or worse, very little access to detailed information themselves.

macspoofing 7y ago

Is this one of the very (very) few cases where blockchain could actually make sense? It sounds like you just need some central store to get (cryptographically verifiable, with revision history) metadata.

dentemple 7y ago
Blockchain can't fix bad data entry.
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  We need a template like the spam one for the obvious "this is why blockchain(s) won't help here" suggestions.
  - macspoofing 7y ago
    I'm actually very negative on blockchain - as it is clearly a interesting technology but one that is desperately looking for a problem to solve.
bitwize 7y ago
This is, incidentally, Imogen Heap's Next Big Idea: to give each musician a sort of CV of record on the blockchain called a "creative passport", such that when they present the passport to a record label or other business partner, everything they worked on or contributed to is visible and attested to. It's a big idea, and I don't think even she is aware of the various pitfalls (blockchain is energetically expensive and cannot fix bad data on its own), but dreaming big is just how Imogen Heap do and it may call attention to the problem in a way that will bring forth actual solutions to parts of it.

herodotus 7y ago

I wrote a very niche App for people who like Opera. It's most important purpose is to display Opera track listing meta-data correctly. (You can see comparison screen shots at https://ariascribe.com https://ariascribe.com). Along the way, I discovered that, even though the genre "opera" has long been recognized, and even has an official ID3v1 tag (103), I have never ever seen the tag used in CDs or downloads. My App has to figure out whether or not an album in a users collection is an Opera. Should have been trivial. Was in fact hard. Very hard.

throwaway77384 7y ago

Hearing lots of people mention blockchain technologies as a solution here. Enter Passport by Mycelia[0] --- [0]http://myceliaformusic.org/ http://myceliaformusic.org/