One of the most feared and often ignored aspect of promoting music online is providing metadata for the songs and albums to various websites, aggregators and music platforms.
It is often boring and cumbersome, but unfortunately, it is one of the most crucial aspect of doing it right. As an indie artist, metadata is indispensable — in fact, it is mandated by various aggregators before you could publish your music on their websites or apps.
So, what to do about it?
The simple answer: You have to understand various terms associated with it. Try providing the relevant information so that your music is uploaded, sorted, labeled, and made discoverable to the users. Remember that the platforms and websites and apps work on codes. This is fed by metadata to find or feature any kind of song or album.
Providing the metadata of your songs and albums is not difficult — it just takes some time and a little bit of persistence from your side.
Here are some terms that you will come across while tackling with the metadata:
- Names of the songwriters
- Who is publishing your songs and are there any performing rights associated with your songs?
- Then, there are some really simple but important information fields that you might need to fill including album name, artist name, year of release, song title, category or genre, and obviously the ISRC.
- Apart from these usual information fields, some may ask further information about sound engineers, session artists, etc.
It is always better to go into details of everything so that you could stand out in the milieu of thousands of artists who are uploading their work on a daily basis. The more specific you are in providing the metadata information, the better the chances are for you to be discoverable.
