METADATA – What’s Important To Ensure When Releasing Your Song!

Identify, label and present audio content.

Creating a new song is always an exciting moment for artists and their contributors in studio. You pour your heart and soul into making the best possible product, with the hope that it will be successful enough to make some money. However, many artists hurry to release their work without taking care to ensure that they are maximizing its availability and shareability. Metadata is crucial if you want your audiences – current and future, to discover your work.

Audio files contain metadata that can be used to identify, label and present audio content. This metadata is used by major digital service providers like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube – not only to assist with royalty allocation, but also to assist algorithms in their quest to take the right music to the right ears. If you want to ensure your music is distributed successfully, confirm and include the following fields, wherever available:

• Unique identifiers (see below)
• Song Title
• Composer/s
• Publisher/s
• Alternative title
• Artist name/s
• Featured artist name/s
• Distributor / master rights owner
• Producer/s
• Genre
• BPM
• Lyrics and language of lyrics
• Album name
• Track Numbers
• Duration

If you don’t have metadata for your tracks, they’re just anonymous files floating around online with no context and no means to track royalties. Metadata helps make your music more discoverable and ensures that your work is properly recognized.

As a songwriter, it’s important to be aware of how your metadata can affect the commercial future of your music. Many technical systems that provide services to rights owners and CMOs scrape metadata from streaming platforms, so whatever information you include when you upload your final master file will have a long-lasting impact. By taking the time to ensure your metadata is accurate and complete, you can help maximize the potential for success of your songs.