Are You Slacking on Metadata? Helpful Tips for Music Tagging

Metadata is the fuel driving the industry into this new digital age, so helpful tips for music tagging are paramount. 

As an emerging artist serious about writing songs, you need to be serious about the size of your audience listening to them. This is where metadata becomes important. It’s an essential way of connecting potential fans with your songs, getting recognized for your work, and generating money from your music. 

Spotify’s product manager Tyler White previously said:
“Accurate publishing metadata is essential to ensure that you get paid as a songwriter. Supplying your publishing metadata right from the very beginning is the best way to prevent problems down the line…”

What is metadata? 

Taken literally, “metadata” is “data about other data.” In the music industry, information embedded in an audio file helps identify its creator. The non-audio area of tags inside each song file can be edited by the creator to help identify a song. 

There are different types of metadata but the main one in a music industry setting is descriptive metadata. This is the information needed to accompany a file on a streaming store and informs its discovery and identification. It can include information such as title, author, keywords, moods, genres, instruments and similar artists. If you work with a digital distribution company like Songtradr, they will be responsible for disseminating this information. However, it will be up to you to ensure the information they have is correct. Digital music services rely heavily on this information to organize their catalogues. Without it, music libraries would be full of uncredited, nameless audio files. 

Why metadata matters

Get found by real fans and music supervisors 

Digital music discovery is driven by search. If your music cannot be easily searched for, it will never be found by potential fans or Music Supervisors. 

According to Spotify’s co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek:
“With more than 50 million tracks now available on Spotify, and growing by close to 40,000 daily, the discover tools we’re building have never been more important to consumers and artists alike.”

Whether you are a music lover or Music Supervisor, looking for a suitable soundtrack hinges on the accuracy of a platform’s metadata. Inputting specific terms into a search bar should ensure you find the appropriate content. If not, then it often means something has gone awry with the metadata. 

Get paid from your plays 

While metadata quality impacts the user experience, it is also crucial in ensuring the songwriter receives the correct royalty payments. Getting it wrong could potentially lead to misidentification and have a detrimental impact on the bank balances of musical talent. A recent report suggested $2.5B worth of royalties are going into so-called royalty black boxes. Furthermore, money is earned but not distributed, as the owner cannot be identified due to poor quality data. If billions of dollars are failing to find their way back to the pockets of the creators, this is a huge missed opportunity. 

Get the credits you deserve 

Metadata is crucial to aid discovery, payment, and ensuring songwriters and artists are credited and recognized for their creative contribution to a particular song or release.

As Spotify said, “We know that for songwriters, your credits are like your business card; it’s your next opportunity. It’s your chance to get your big break.” 

The right credit can go a long way to demonstrate the skills and achievements of a new songwriter and open up plenty of doors that may otherwise have remained closed. 

 

How to master your metadata 

With so much money and opportunities at stake, why has the music industry struggled to master the metadata challenge? 

Currently there’s no standardization around the way this information is collated or formatted. This means databases between publishers, digital service providers and the performing rights organizations (PROs) are potentially different. Collaboration is at the heart of much of our best music but the more writers or producers on different tracks, the greater the complexity and challenge of getting the data right. With myriad version of songs, whether it be covers, radio edits, remixes or acoustic renditions, the data challenge also spirals. PROs such as ASCAP process billions of lines of data each year and this amount is only set to increase. With manual data input, there’s plenty of room for mistakes or the duplication of information through human error. 

If the metadata is incomplete or full of mistakes, then your music is in danger of being removed from a platform like Spotify or Apple Music. With such a huge audience using these services, you need to be present to stand a chance of making an impact and developing a lasting career in a very busy marketplace. To help you overcome the metadata challenge, we’ve compiled some essential advice about music metadata and how to get it right… 

Prioritize metadata at the beginning of a music project 

Today’s songwriters and producers need to be aware of their metadata responsibilities from the start. Metadata is always important whether you’re working on a solo project or collaboration. If you are working on a track alone, then remind yourself to record all relevant information as accurately as possible from the beginning. As soon as any other collaborators or contributors become involved, then it’s good practice to ensure everyone is aware of the need to record this data accurately. While recording this information can be a challenge, there are resources available to help. Sound Credit is a great online tool to help you stay on top of who is responsible for what. You can embed credits directly into the audio files shared between collaborators while its tracker plug‑in lets you capture complete credits and production details live during studio sessions.

Confirm songwriting splits and credits as soon as possible

Certain tracks from Beyoncé or Rihanna have more than 10 credited writers and producers. Attached to each is a music publisher so the complexity (and potential for mistakes) in how data is handled dramatically increases. As soon as a song is finished, it’s worth confirming any songwriting splits and credits while they’re still fresh in the memory. In today’s music world, many songs have long creative chains with numerous contributors involved in the creative process. PROs such as ASCAP offer songwriting split sheets to help you record splits and credits. It’s worth completing this with your fellow co-writers, then committing to a written agreement to ensure everyone is clear about who did what. Adhering to this best practice should help royalties flow as smoothly as possible. 

Be as accurate as possible when tagging your music 

Try to be as precise as possible when it comes to inputting data and tagging your music. Once you’ve decided on the spelling and formatting of the text in your metadata, you need to standardize this for every song in your artist project. 

When adding your music to Songtradr, you have the opportunity to tag by genre, keyword, lyric, and mood. Each song can have up to three associated genres or sub-genres. Keywords are descriptive terms which can cover instrumentation or the type of production a track might be suitable for. Songtradr also allows for adding lyrics to accommodate certain briefs that request specific or related lyrics. It’s sensible to have as many appropriate tags as allowable. Always double, even triple check the details around a track before submitting. It’s more challenging to update the data once a track has been distributed as every file will need to be cleaned up. 

Artists inputting metadata should only use each field as required. For example, when inputting the title of a track, there’s no need to include additional information such as the song format or mix. Other metadata elements can include vocal type, tempo and BPM.

Avoid over-tagging or duplications

It’s important to remember that using a large variety of tags will not aid the discovery of your music. It’s also useful to know that duplicating tags is unnecessary and inefficient so your time is better spent elsewhere. 

If you tag in a bid to manipulate the system, it’s unlikely to help make your music more discoverable. Instead, it’s good practice to keep your tagging as straightforward as possible and to work with, rather than against, the system. This way your music will appear in searches when it’s needed by consumers or Music Supervisors (if they are searching for songs to license) and lead to a rewarding interaction. For example, if someone is looking for an uplifting acoustic song, they don’t want an EDM bass-heavy track to appear in their searches. Tagging sensibly will ensure that compatible fans and tastemakers come to you. Tagging can be a career-changing moment. It could you get picked up by a Spotify editor and added to one of their influential playlists. Or it may mean a Music Supervisor finds your music suitable for a sync placement.

Work with your PRO and music publisher 

When you have completed a song and have recorded all the information as accurately as possible, make sure you send it to your music publisher. Any decent publisher worth their salt will then send this over to your collecting society or PRO. If you’re unpublished, you will be the one to send to your PRO. Providing these organizations with an accurate registration of a song will mean it is in the PRO’s database and you should receive royalties from all uses of your music — whether that be streaming plays, radio broadcasts or more. 

Stick to a distributor’s metadata best practice

Each service or distribution platform has instructions and best practices around how music should be uploaded. Songtradr provides plenty of guidance on how to add your music and use their content management system, on both their blog and support site. Remember, even small mistakes can end up costing an artist unpaid royalties or credits, so it always takes time to get it right. 

Use the latest innovations/technology to help 

If this sounds daunting, don’t worry. There are plenty of online resources to help, whether that be guides, how-tos or specific apps and services.  SPLITs is a mobile app from the Create Music Group aiming to eliminate songwriting disputes. It simplifies the process of assigning credits. This occurs by enabling users to generate a free splits agreement on a smartphone in just a few clicks. Auddly is a song data hub founded in Sweden by Niclas Molinde. With backing from ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, the company strives to fill the gap in the music industry’s data. Working with UK collecting society, PRS for Music, and ASCAP in the US, the platform enables music creators to collect song data. They can also register their works with both societies at the point of creation.

 

The music industry is in this together

“Your writing credits are like your pension. Investing in your publishing data is investing in your long-term future as an artist and your ability to be creative throughout your life,” Spotify’s Troy White has previously said.

It’s the responsibility of all artists, producers and songwriters to do what they can to stay on top of their metadata. Although there’s plenty of poor data out there, remaining vigilant and doing the metadata homework can have real benefits. As a sector, it’s in everyone’s interests to keep the royalty supply chain as clean as possible. 

In today’s modern music industry, leading independent artists are more than just songwriters and music makers. They’re entrepreneurs and start-ups with their music pivoting around an adoption of tech and well-tuned content. Metadata is just one important part of the tool kit they need to leverage to stay ahead, and give themselves the best chance of music success. 

 

Read more about metadata and why it is important for music discovery.