
Metadata is the biggest little problem plaguing the music industry - cpeterso
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18531476/music-industry-song-royalties-metadata-credit-problems
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wrs
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.

~~~
sonnyblarney
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.

~~~
falcor84
>The people in that industry are surprisingly not tech savvy

As the quote goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
his salary depends upon his not understanding it" \- I'm confident that things
would be entirely if the industry suddenly found it in its best interest to
become tech savvy.

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aston
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
"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
Meanwhile, Lou Reed owned 100% of “Can I Kick It?” royalties. So much good art
doesn’t get put out because of greed.

~~~
kasey_junk
Wait are you using the “Can I Kick It” analogy to argue in favor or against
greed stopping art?

Because that example is a really weird grey area. The label didn’t clear one
of the most obvious samples of all time. The original artist did _not_ prevent
them from releasing the derived work, but Tribe didn’t get paid for one of
their classics.

I’m not sure what to think of that story.

~~~
SomeOldThrow
Honestly I'm rather against needing to clear samples at all. I think the art
should come before any concern that it would put someone into debt via a
lawsuit—it should never result in making no money off it when the value is
clearly in the product of the sample + performance.

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Mbaqanga
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.

~~~
tmd83
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
> Ohh it's accurate in the sense that it records who is the owner, the record
> label.

Oh, you'd be amazed...

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alexchamberlain
I think [MusicBrainz][1] deserves a shout out on this topic.

[1]: [https://musicbrainz.org/](https://musicbrainz.org/)

~~~
zimpenfish
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_organisatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_rights_organisation)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_rights_management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_rights_management)

~~~
33degrees
Indeed, MusicBrainz contains the names of songwriters, but not the
organisations they belong to

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imglorp
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.

~~~
naniwaduni
Immutability is quite nearly the opposite of useful here. The most common way
for data to be wrong is at the interface boundary: it was entered wrong in the
first place.

~~~
drpyser
Immutability, the way I think the author means it, doesn't mean data can't be
changed ever, in any way. It just means that modifications(e.g. corrections)
cannot completely overwrite previous values without leaving any trace, but
instead have to appear as amendments, visible alongside the previous versions
of the data.

If it was entered wrong, you can issue a correction, but a trace of the first,
wrong value will stay available.

That means nobody can just say something was never what it was, just that it
changed(and then have to justify why).

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herodotus
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.

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throwaway77384
Hearing lots of people mention blockchain technologies as a solution here.

Enter Passport by Mycelia[0]

\---

[0][http://myceliaformusic.org/](http://myceliaformusic.org/)

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macspoofing
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
Blockchain can't fix bad data entry.

~~~
zimpenfish
We need a template like the spam one for the obvious "this is why
blockchain(s) won't help here" suggestions.

~~~
macspoofing
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.

