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 artists 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.
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 listen 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 insure 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, I stumbled upon a
third-party service which,
while not 100% percent accurate, has the benefits of being free to
browse, and aggregates all of an artists collaborations in a single page
— something I hope will see broader adoption going forward.
