Indie Almanac #1: Credit to the credits

My best attempt at an advice column, Indie Almanac is a series that aims to resource independent artists with essential, unbiased information 💪

The excellent Bonnie Knight posed a really important question the other day. As an engineer and music fan, they wanted to know who worked on a record, and why that information wasn’t readily available in Spotify’s credits.

Bonnie 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀 @bobomilieu

why don't @Spotify have more credits than just writer/s and producer/s?! I have so much interest in knowing who else worked on something (performers, engineers, mastering engineer etc)

Making music is inherently collaborative. A project can have many folks involved — writers, producers, session musicians, mix engineer, mastering engineer and more. However in the digital landscape, it’s often hard to ensure everyone is credited. Without liner notes, booklets or even the ability to upload descriptive text with a release (a notable exception here being Bandcamp or videos uploaded to YouTube) there are fewer sources for this information.

As a hot button issue in the digital age, it’s long been discussed how we can tackle this problem. Companies like Jaxsta are attempting to do just that, by building a library of extensive credits.

Major player Spotify only permits Writer and Producer credits. Its competitor Apple Music permits Composer credits which you can only view on desktop. Platforms like Tidal allow more exhaustive credits on both mobile and desktop, but their user base is much smaller in comparison.

This however raises the question of how credits actually land on platforms.

Streaming platforms (commonly referred to as DSP’s) are, essentially, vessels for information sent to them via 3rd parties. Most distributors, labels and rights-holders collect, organise and deliver metadata via a standardised supply chain called DDEX. The quality and completeness of a release is in the hands of who delivered it — rather than the platform itself.

Information collected includes essentials such as artwork, title, artists (primary and featured), genre, preview timestamp, copyright attribution, ISRC and UPC. However, depending on the capabilities of your delivery partner, you can also include further information such as writers, producers, lyrics, engineers, musicians and other miscellaneous credits that are recognised by DDEX.

With this in mind, why do so many credits on Spotify remain empty?

It comes down to the capabilities of the distributing partner. Some services don't have the ability to add credits built into their UX. Or perhaps it's not available to their general user base and instead is a 'priority' feature only. There also may be time or resource constraints that means it’s not always a viable option to deliver a product with additional metadata. There is also a very real possibility that the artist and their team haven’t thought to fill this information out, or are not perturbed by its inclusion.

It’s good to note that even if Spotify did launch more exhaustive credits, the issue of credit sections remaining empty would be ongoing. Is there a simple solve to this? For now, not really. However, if you’re an individual affected by this you can take action by enquiring with your distributor/label to ensure you’re partnering with a provider that if needed, can prioritise the send of comprehensive metadata.

Stay tuned for upcoming Indie Almanac topics:

• The basics of distribution

• Anatomy of a release cycle

• Content protection and you