In the days of vinyl and tape cassettes, providing your listeners with information about your music was simple: Everything from song titles to song-writers, lyrics to album art, engineering credits to UPC codes, could be included in the sleeve or album sticker, and that was that.
Today, what drives growth in the industry are music downloads, rather than physical sales, which continue their slow decline. But even as consumers increasingly turn away from physical media, we haven’t lost liner notes entirely. They’ve just begun to move onto our hard drives and into the cloud.
Current tools for sharing essential info, basic credits and album artwork on digital files can still be improved industry-wide. But as things stand, if your release is missing all of these things, the fault does not lie with the technology. And ss complex as all the metadata options may sound, breaking them down into a few main categories to help bring the whole field into focus.
Today, we’ll be discussing CD-Text, ID3 tags and online databases – the three main vehicles for distributing the information and extras that you can provide with a digital release.