Credit where it’s due: transforming poor music credit metadata by putting creatives in control

The below post – by Kyran de Keijzer, Co-founder and CPO of Muso.AI – is Partner Content.

At Muso.AI, we’re delivering lifetime, greatest-of-all-time, big data energy type of analytics that get creatives motivated to engage with their data again. Total streams, Shazams, charts, playlists, collaborations and more; we’re giving the power of data back to the creatives. Why? Here’s the story of my relationship with music credits – and why credit data matters so much.

Before the digital age of music, it was somewhat easy to identify a collaborator, behind-the-scenes contributor, and basically anyone who worked on a track. All the information was all right there in the liner notes in any vinyl record, cassette, or CD.

In the late 90s, when music distribution rapidly moved into the digital space and, retroactively, reacted to the call for avenues for digital consumption, all those credits were left behind, nowhere to be found in the metadata. And not just credits—the skilled musicians, songwriters, producers, small studios, and vocalists those credits belonged to were seemingly erased from the ledger.

What started with the mayhem and non-standardization of the black-market Napster years never got much better, even after labels started legally leasing their music out to apps like Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify down the road. I remember buying CDs well into the 2010s, just to access the liner notes – to find out who the songwriters were on my favorite songs, or which band members wrote what.

The human problem of missing credits

Beyond the marketplace, as a creative, the seemingly insurmountable problem of missing credits has been even more frustrating than most business people can imagine.

I’ve worked alongside countless creatives behind the scenes, and the endless loop of the same story plays over and over. Some people would tell it to me with tears in their eyes. They can’t fix their credits; there’s no way in. I’ll never forget a colleague lamenting about missing out on a Grammy Award – and still hitting barrier after barrier when they reached out to the label to correct the issue.

There are few to no reason for labels to involve themselves in sorting out the data for digital platforms, and streaming companies so far don’t seem to see the need to prioritize getting credits right for behind-the-scenes creators.

Creating a source of credit data truth

Heading into the “data is king” era of the Internet, every branch of the industry has let the greater creator pool down when it comes to credits.

With everything we know about the power of information sharing, we’ve been long overdue a solution that centers the creators, that centers transparency.

Enter ENCORE 2022.

Our team has spent seven years with the immense music credit datasets, training AI to index credits – to create the industry’s go-to cohesive, comprehensive source of truth. We’ve created an easy point of entry for creatives and rights holders to have a place to meet and verify what liner notes of yesterday used to confirm. We’ve put the work in so others don’t have to.

What we’ve found is far from surprising. Missing credits, misspellings, duplicate entries. It’s the same stuff you used to see with Napster indexing, but it’s in the actual official industry data – and it’s mind boggling.

At Muso.AI, we’re not just trying to educate collaborators on their credits. We’re actively giving every role in the industry a way to claim their work, verify credits, and boost their visibility based on data-driven performance.

Ushering in a music credit renaissance

Muso.AI ENCORE – in its debut season right now, and available through January 20, 2023 – exists because every creative deserves to have a platform to stand on, an end-of-year roundup they can tout, and a data-based career-retrospective they can share to help book new jobs, validate rates, and find new collaborations.

We’re here to usher in a music credit renaissance. Imagine: searchable liner notes for the nerdiest of us all. Not only can digital music credits be transparent and accessible, they can belong to everyone.

When we started working with the industry’s data, it was siloed, misinformed, incomplete, indiscriminate. The more we dug in, the more issues were apparent. Uncredited roles, wrong accreditations, entanglements that needed untangling—worse than anyone on our team thought possible. It became clear the only way to sort through the mess was to engage the people who knew the data best: the people who were there making the music.

The creatives, in control of their credits

So what gets creatives reinvested in their data? Ready to fight the battle for their rights again?

It turns out it’s simple. Accessibility. Transparency.

These are the tenets that need to lead the way into the future. Muso.AI ENCORE and daily analytics are making credits matter again. We’ve found the golden ticket to making credits easy again — performance insight.

It’s long overdue that the people behind the music can see how their body of work is thriving, expanding, and reaching across streaming and social platforms, daily, weekly, and historically.

We’re not only training people to ignore the stigma that has surrounded credits for so long, we’re giving them the ability to take control of a verifiable mechanism to make their credits accessible to every single platform, follower, and fan.

The fact is, accurate credit data can be as sexy and as influential as a spot at Glastonbury when wielded in the right way. We’re here to make sure those connections, that reach, the potential, doesn’t go unnoticed.

Find out what you’re missing out on. Download Muso.AI and check your credits today. Gain premium access to in-depth analytics with a seven-day free trial to Muso.AI Pro at any time.