Credit Report

Creating a studio album is a labor of love. From songwriting and arranging, to recording and producing, to mixing and mastering, there are countless hours and iterations that go into the songs you listen to. During each of these stages, artists may choose to involve others in their process. Though these collaborators are rarely listed as primary artists, save for the occasional featured vocalist, their contributions and tastes shape the resulting work in an important way.

Back when albums were only released in physical formats, these collaborations would typically be listed in the album's liner notes that came tucked in the CD case or album sleeve. If you, the listener, wanted to see a definitive list of everyone who contributed to a track you liked, you could be sure that you could readily find that information and that it would be accurate.

With the advent of digital formats, online distribution platforms, and later streaming services, this certainty began to unravel. For years now, digital listeners have had no sure-fire way to identify all the people who worked on the music they listen to.

Though major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have both taken the step of building a place for the song credits to go, the information that ends up there can often be dreadfully incomplete. Even when accurate credit information does exist, there is no place on either platform for users to see all of an artist's collaborations all in one place.

Since music artists tend to have extremely developed tastes in music themselves, the fact that it is so hard to see which artists the artists we enjoy listening to choose to work with and sample means we are unable to use this as an extremely reliable heuristic for music discovery. To get an idea of what we are missing out on, consider Frank Ocean's 2016 Album, Blonde. As of March 2024, Spotify's song credits show 7 people (including Frank Ocean) as having worked on Blonde. The correct number is 82. This includes multiple Grammy award-winning artists, up-and-coming alternative artists, and samples from decades ago.

Star Power

Lasting Influence

In a world where perfect credit information was easily accessible, young and old listeners alike would be able to discover new songs that resonated with someone they already listened to. So what stands in the way? To get an answer as to what is causing the inaccuracies in credit information on streaming platforms, I spoke with Michael Kushner, Senior Vice President at Warner Music Group, who has worked in the record industry since 1987.

As Kushner explains: "Record companies create label copy based on what we are told by the artist, who is responsible for delivering the recordings under our recording agreements. The A&R (artists and repertoire) folks who work with the artists help ensure accuracy, which is something we always strive for. That label copy is supplied as metadata to the streaming services, but the services themselves are not consistent about what data they display, and where."

Whether any major streaming platform will devote the considerable resources to fix this leaky data collection pipeline remains to be seen. In the meantime, you can get a sense of what kinds of music discovery such a change would enable by exploring the full list of artists, producers, and samples from Frank Ocean's album Blonde below: