YouTube Music may soon add song credits to speed it up with competitors like Spotify and Tidal.
Currently, there is no way to see the full album or song titles on YouTube Music. But that may change soon. An attentive Reddit user noticed a change in the songs menu, which now includes the ability to view the authorship of songs. Clicking on the additional menu next to each song will display options with “View Song Authorship” to see the composer, producer, songwriters and artists listed by the music metadata provider.
This option will depend on whether the publishers get the music metadata right, so everyone involved in this process will get recognition. Music titles are something the music industry is still struggling with, especially when big players like Google don’t bring it to the end user for a very long time. The experience of knowing who is involved in the creation of the album should not differ for digital music listeners from those who buy CDs and vinyl.
Metadata includes all the basic information related to the released song or album. Without this, those who produce music leave money on the table.
“Recently, a musician signed to a major indie label told me that he was owed up to $40,000 in royalties for songs that they could never get. It wasn’t that they missed payments for one song, but that they missed payments for 70 songs in at least six years,” writes The Verge, describing how the metadata problem is plaguing the music industry. .
Getting the right metadata for everyone involved in the process is a huge task. There are no standards for collecting or displaying information, and there is no need to verify the accuracy of the provided metadata before publishing a song. Even accurate metadata containing spelling errors can lead to the scenario presented above — the creator loses money due to a technical problem.
