6 State reasons to index a sound recording with metadata

1. Assign proper credit to rights holders and creative contributors
2. Link rights holders and creative contributors to unique standard identifiers
3. Geolocate creative content
4. Adopt DDEX international standards
5. Participate in trans-national standard definition
6. Improve content discoverability

Bruegel l'Ancien (1568) The Blind Leading the Blind

Bruegel l’Ancien (1568) The Blind Leading the Blind

►Create/Produce ►Tag/Declare ►Distribute ►CONSUME ►Measure ►Pay Royalty

1. Assign proper credit to rights holders and creative contributors : a digital musical sound recording is just meaningless orphan binary data if it does not embed or link itself to rights holders, contributors and descriptive information allowing context to emerge, account statement and accurate royalty payment.

Concerned are all lyricists, composers, publishers, performers and musicians, producers, music producers, recording studios, record labels, etc. Public policy supporting the production of original content should make sure those content are properly tagged (Embedded Metadata – Blockchain) before entering the commercial value chain to allow optimal exploitation and return on investment.

The lack of mechanical licenses looms as a major liability for streaming services, and the publishers’ association estimates that as much as 25 percent of the activity on these platforms is unlicensed… Spotify countered that it lacked the data to sort out which publishers had legitimate claims over songs, or even how to locate all the parties… (NY Times)

2. Intellectual propriety assets and contributors must be tied to unique standard iD’s. ISRC, ISWC, IPI, ISTC, IPN, ISAN, EIDR, ISNI are either ISO or industrial standards allowing tracing, disambiguation or machine to machine processes and must be used.

Most type of contributor or rightsholder can be linked to a specific unique identifier. These codes document the whole value chain flowchart and can allow better automated automatch processes.

3. Creative content metadata should include geolocation information with regards to several place of creation, place of birth, place of location of head office and the like. It will allow geolocation within recommendation and several other useful tasks. ISO3166-1, ISO3166-2, UN-LOCODE or .kml (Keyhole Markup Language) should be used when possible.

4. Production companies, digital agregators and content users should adopt DDEX international electronic data interchange (EDI) standards and Message Suite Standards allowing dissemination of metadata : RIN (Recording Information Notification), ERN (Electronic Release Notification), MLC (Music Licensing Companies), DSR (Digital Sales Reporting).

5. Whenever possible or sometimes necessary, Canadian stakeholders should participate in digital trans-national standard definition and engage time and efforts at tables such as : UNESCO, CISAC, ISO, DDEX, ICANN, NCUC, ISOC, W3C-RDF or IETF.

6. The music industry must rebuild confidence between rightsholders and the public, improve content discoverability based on recommendation algorithm, improve access to rich descriptive data often lost in the digital shift, engage efforts in building the semantic Web. We must allow CanCon to thrive!

We are also a bilingual digital culture watch on Delicious, Scoop.it and under hashtag #musicmetadata

TGiT is a Canadian start-up project and software built to empower creators, performers, publishers and record labels. TGiT allows “tagging at the source” for stakeholder and rightsholder. Art should never be anonymous!