#59 - What is fuss over metadata?
#59 - What is fuss over metadata?
Remember when you'd buy a CD or vinyl? You'd pour over the information and read all the panels or look at the booklet inside and out. Now, you buy a download or stream a song and where do you get that same information? Do you have to research at the artist website? Find it on the streaming service? Is the information you music manager giving you correct? Where does that information come from?
It's called "metadata". Here's the Oxford dictionary definition...
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a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.
Maybe 10% of the public cares about the information beyond who the artist is or the song title. But those that do care are passionate about it. Those passionate ones want to know who was the background singer, who engineered the album, where was it recorded, what instruments were played, etc. Those most passionate will research about how the album was made.
Collecting information for the graphic artist to put on the disc covers was challenging back in the day but nothing as the horror of doing it now. It seems no two systems for ingesting metadata is the same, let alone using the standardized field names. And where do the credits go for the crew and team that performed on the album? It seems few systems even allow for that information.
The only good news about metadata is that it makes doing taxes easy.
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