Credits ARE NOT listed in Digital music releases

[Timeline]

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permali ... 420credits

"I'm a Producer & Engineer. And I'm Invisible on Digital Music Services..."

This involves all players, producers, engineers and anyone who performed on a CD released digitally or on private labels or even listed on CD Baby. This must be corrected!

Indeed, groups like SoundExchange struggle daily with incomplete metadata, and adding lots of extra fields to pre-existing metadata files sounds migraine-producing.

"We can watch movies online with the credits included, and the same should be true for digitally released recordings," said NARAS president Neil Portnow. "If music devices can access millions of tracks in the cloud, we're confident we can find a way to acknowledge those who created the tracks here on Earth."

Count feels that a failure to properly address this issue could alter the ability of fans to properly interact with their favorite bands. And, perhaps more tragically, erase certain names from future Wikipedias.

"If Led Zeppelin had only sold albums digitally when they started, it's very unlikely that many people would know who Jimmy Page or Robert Plant are because the digital music files you purchase for download or streaming can't show you who played on them."

Check this out!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

While I do think featured players should be accorded the same credits as writers and maybe some higher end producers on album documentation in the form of meta data, I doubt all but the most entrenched music pros and aficionados will be searching for, or care about, the engineer on a project or look for them in the search engines. If it's easy enough to include, great but...

If credit on the digital album is only in the form of the metadata, I am in 100% agreement, all should be included - in theory. But then again, that would imply that each member of an orchestra be listed in each digital release and that is probably not going to happen. It would also imply that the orchestral librarians, copyists, printers, etc. also be listed so you can see how an "all inclusive" model, while not so big a deal for a band, might be a giant task for larger ensembles, theater, opera, TV, film scores, and other releases where lots of people are involved.

[stephentayler]

If you are on Facebook, check this out:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-camp ... 5686629316

Stephen

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I "liked" it. Thanks for the link! It is, of course, a good thing to credit people who contribute to making your art shine. And wouldn't it be lov-a-ly if every person were properly documented! Again, small projects are easy enough to do that. I doubt compelling a company to do that is in the cards. Greed does still seem to be the order of the day when it comes to any form of commercialism and I applaud those who want to give proper credit where it is due.

Then again, a music producer might not want to engineer to take any credit and indeed, I've worked with a few engineers who really should be taking blame rather than credit. LOL! It's a two sided sword in that regard.

[mikehalloran]

Although this can be a gigantic can of worms, there's no reason the industry can't adopt the 1972 standards for crediting at the very least.

[twistedtom]

There is an article on this in Electronic Musicians magazine. It talks about the future of getting a standard to put meta data on recorded digital music like MP3 and such.