Musicians are still widely thought of as sidemen, but they’re quietly gaining prominence as digital companies mature.
Allmusic.com, a reference site that launched in 1994, is the granddaddy of the free, public-facing sources for country musician data, routinely providing credits for entire albums. But Apple Music and Genius.com have upped the competition for information by providing more granular data for individual tracks. And YouTube, in recent years, has begun stuffing track-specific musician info into the gray area that features copyright material and total views underneath its videos. In some cases, the public inputs the data. In others, data experts such as Xperi gather the information and lease it to public sites.
“It’s the latest phase in a very interesting, convoluted journey, starting with the demise of physical product,” says Nashville’s American Federation of Musicians Local 257 president Dave Pomeroy. “There’s less and less physical product [with] space to write the credits in.”
To be certain, that reduction in space for credits occurred before the streaming era began. Track-by-track credits probably peaked in album liner notes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly among jazz, rock and pop recordings. When the CD replaced vinyl albums, the liner notes tended to lump the project’s total musician credits together. If the credits featured, say, five different drummers and 10 guitarists, it was impossible for the listener to know which were participating in a particular track. Plus, the type was so small that many consumers needed a magnifying glass to read them. It was such a hassle that a once-pleasurable experience became a chore.
And yet, that CD platform looked more attractive to music nerds once the streaming era took hold.
“If you’re downloading an mp3, you’re lucky to get an album cover, let alone figure out who played harpsichord or saxophone or who did the turntables on the specific track,” AllMusic.com senior product manager Zac Johnson says. “That has been lost for a while, but I think people are seeing the importance of it. Being able to [provide] that kind of stuff — not only at an album level, but at a song level — is of value to people.”
The uptick in musician credits is a result of at least two different developments. First, record labels have stepped up their game in providing that kind of metadata to companies that want to use it.
“It used to be a real hodgepodge,” Johnson says. “Sometimes you’d [just] get a UPC and an album title, and sometimes you would get everything down to the hair and makeup people that worked on the album. So I think it has improved over the years.”
Additionally, the resurgence of vinyl albums has returned the available space for liner notes on physical product to 1970s levels, and that info is thus more readily available to fans who, once they’re approved, input that data to some public sites, including Genius and Wikipedia.
“There is some amount of information that we get directly from artists and their teams, but that’s definitely the minority,” says Genius.com product manager Colby Handy. “We have over 10 million song pages on the site, and it’s really just those passionate music fans who wait up late at night for the album drop just to transcribe the lyrics or they’re eager for the next announcement from their favorite artists, and they kind of get the recognition and feel like [they’re] being a part of the music as it comes out.”
Maintaining that metadata is harder than it might appear. Some sites, for example, have listings for both the misspelled guitarist Dan Huff and the correctly labeled Dann Huff. HARDY, meanwhile, is the stage name for songwriter Michael Hardy, and the data-entry staff — as well as their editors — need to be aware of as many of those alternate names as they can to make their database as authoritative as possible.
And for most websites, that data is not the primary attraction. Some 90% of Genius.com visitors use the site for lyrics, Handy says, and the musician info is intended to enrich the experience. YouTube visitors presumably would reference that data as they listen to a particular song, possibly combing through the credits to identify the guitarist who plays the solo, as an example. When they see that same name on other songs, it becomes another layer of understanding that can make the listening experience deeper.
“As a casual music listener, especially as a young casual music listener, you might not even think about who’s playing the drums,” Handy notes. “You might not even think to look for that information. And so having that be accessible to everyone feels really important for us because it exposes that idea to people. And you can kind of get lost going through the interconnected spiderweb of it all.”
Making the information accessible is one thing; making it obvious is another. Seventy percent of Genius.com’s traffic comes from mobile devices, according to Handy, and smartphones’ smaller screens make it more difficult to present metadata in a spot on the page where most viewers can see it without compromising their access to the lyrics that typically drove them to the site.
AllMusic.com’s Johnson says he has seen plenty of companies attempt to build a business around metadata, only to disappear within a few years. The AFM’s Pomeroy has likewise been in talks for decades about those credits, which affect payments to union members when recordings are used on TV shows or in commercials.
Still, despite the growing interest in credits, no one to date can take credit for standardizing the data.
“I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had over the last 10 years, if not 20 years, about metadata and how metadata was going to fix everything because all the information is going to get embedded into the files,” Pomeroy says. “But I’m not aware of there ever being a consensus as to what the format in the system was going to be.”