DDEX Creator Credit Summit highlights the importance of all stakeholders in the quest for better data

By Emmanuel Legrand

Music industry standard-setting organisation DDEX held back to back its 36th Plenary Meeting and 2nd Creator Credit Summit in November, both as virtual events. The Creator Credit Summit featured over 30 speakers, including composers, producers, engineers, representatives from record labels, distributors, and international rights organisations, over three consecutive days.

  Topics included themes addressing different aspects of creator credits and tools to assist in their proper use, such as proper identification and payment; the conundrum of entering credits in the recording process; DIY musicians and metadata; and music metadata in audio/visual works.  The Summit also included presentations from seven companies (Creative Passport, Jammber, Muso.ai, Quansic, Session, Sound Credit, and VEVA Sound) that provide tools helping creators deal with data issues, all of them incorporating the DDEX Recording Information Notification Standard (RIN).

  Here are five takeaways from the Summit.  

 1 – Standards matter 

   Mark Isherwood from DDEX’s Secretariat (pictured below), summed up best in his introduction the importance of a common set of data for the music industry: “DDEX defines the lingua franca for the music industry.” It’s a data language that allows different parts of the industry to interact, and eventually for rights holders and creators to get remunerated.  

 

 “DDEX standards cover a significant part of the industry and business transactions have a DDEX standard to support these transactions,” said Isherwood, who added: “If you don’t speak DDEX, getting information from partners is going to be tricky.”  

  But Isherwood also added a note of caution: For the system to work, it all depends on where the data originates. If the data is from unreliable sources or badly entered, the system cannot function. It is up to all the various stakeholders to play their role in ensuring that data is accurate and also collected as early as possible in the process.  “Metadata is a love note to the future,” concluded Isherwood.

   

  2 – Give credit where deserved  

  In the digital world, one set of information that has often disappeared with the convenience of all-access music on streaming services are the credits that, well, give credit to all the people involved in the various aspects of the recording of music. No one better than Jimmy Jam, one half with Terry Lewis of the production duo Jam & Lewis (pictured, below), made a better call for the value of credits.  

  “I was always intrigued at the little names of songwriters, producers, engineers,” at the back of the record covers, said Jam, in conversation with Maureen Droney, Sr.Managing Director for the Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing. “It was always fascinating to me to see that there were certain groups that I liked and some records that sounded different,” he explained. “I was getting information as I was listening and that was part of my musical education.”

  In 1982, Jam & Lewis co-wrote their first hit, ‘High Hopes’ by SOS Band, which was engineered by Steve Hodge. “We knew the name Steve Hodge through looking at liner notes of albums from bands like Shalamar. So who is the engineer, and where did he record? That’s what we did. If it weren’t for the liner notes we wouldn’t be here.”  

  Hence his call for people to take seriously the need to enter credits at all stages, particularly during time in the studio. He’s been an evangelist on behalf of the Grammys, which use credits for the nomination process, to convince artists to take credits seriously. “People use the information that is in the credits, so if the information is there you are going to be part of the process, and it can only go as far as what is given to us,” he explained. Overall, Jam said he believed that standardising data “makes sense” in the digital age where data will determine what gets to the DSPs and how people will be paid.

  3 – No data = no money  

  In the wake of Jimmy Jam’s timely reminder of the importance of credits, the participants in the session ‘How credits improve contributor identification and payment’ dug deeper into the data alphabet soup and the need to get data right.  

  “Credits were on the back of an album, today we have a much deeper set of information,” said moderator Tony Brooke from Warner Music Group who emphasised the importance of standardised identifiers such as ISNIs (International Standard Name Identifier), IPIs,IPNs, as well as the ISRCs (recording) and ISWCs (composition). “It is really important that credits include identifiers,” said Brooke.  

 

 “Credits are no longer a rarity, they’re ubiquitous,” he added, noting that music streaming services are increasingly displaying credit information to help consumers access music through different angles, such as the producer of a recording or the songwriter(s). “Music services are showing this data,” he said. “Spotify is a leader in this space: who wrote the song, who produced it, and they make links to other works. It is super cool and very hard to do unless you have identifiers.”  

  Why does it matter and how do credits affect the market place? For Brooke, having the proper credits “boosts discovery and revenue, helps new content discovery, increases user engagement, improves user search results, is a way to differentiate music service interfaces, improves search engine optimisation, and fuels data science for algorithms used for playlists.”  

  Dae Bogan, head of third party partnerships at the Mechanical Licensing Collective, said "metadata has to be captured and distributed to all the different types of sources, and we have to make sure that everyone has that data. Every label and publisher has to make sure the collective management organisations (CMOs) get that data and also the DSPs and third-parties like Gracenoteor Audible Magic.”  

  Adam Gorgoni, a composer and founding member of Songwriters of North America (SONA), said his organisation has set up SNAG: the sexy metadata action group to educate songwriters about the importance of data. He admits that data is not necessarily a conversation that creators want to have. “You are talking to creative people who have no interest in metadata,” he said. “We are in a creative process, and it is hard to talk about splits and various data points. This is not the most creative conversation but we push songwriters at large to do it because the data collected in the studio is crucial.”

  4 – A cue sheet is the holy grail for AV and music metadata 

  Anyone who has been involved in music for film and TV knows the importance of cue sheets. These are documents that list all the various music segments on a show or a film, and the more accurate they are, the more likely anyone who contributed will be paid when the movie/TV show is played, streamed, downloaded, etc. This requires capturing data at source about music used in audio-visual productions for the various players along the value chain.

  For the speakers on the panel ‘Music and audio-visual production – a different spin on metadata’, the answer was that more collective work from all parties would ensure that data is listed correctly in the cue sheet, and then cue sheets have to be standardised so that studios as well as DSPs and CMOs work from the same, well, sheet…  

 Nick Osztreicher, Director of Music at Netflix, said the key issue with cue sheets is about developing actionable business solutions, and cue sheets are part of the process. A service like Netflix supplies cue sheets into the CMO system, and standardisation would indeed help. “Adoption has to be driven by societies; we can create the files but people have to accept them,” he said.  

  The session happened the day the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), teaming up with music publishers and producers through the Society Publisher Forum (ICMP, IMPA, IMPF, AIMP), announced the Cue Sheet Standards & Rules that will “harmonise music cue sheets” and simplify the rules governing the identification of musical works used in audiovisual productions. 

  “Standards are something we all want.” said Osztreicher, who added that Netflix brings a layer of complication as its business is global and “things have to apply globally, and it is not easy because of the scale.”

  Accuracy is what CMOs need, explained Helena Segersten from French rights society SACEM. Like many other CMOs, SACEM licenses video-on-demand services (since 2010 in the case of SACEM). “We take data from services and match it with what we have registered in our database and then distribute to our members,” she said. Hence the need for accurate and operational data. And quite often the data is, as she put it, presented in “exotic formats” that do not necessarily contain all the data. Segersten said CISAC’s harmonised cue sheet should improve accuracy. “We now want to promote the [CISAC cue-sheet] around the world,” she said.”It is a step towards a standard.”

 5 – Someone has to take responsibility for the credits

  So how can stakeholders make sure data is collected and attributed properly? Participants in the session ‘Entering credits in the recording process: Whose job is it anyway?’ simply agreed that “it’s everybody’s job.” According to The Recording Academy’s Maureen Droney, it is the responsibility of the producers, the engineers, the musicians, and any party who is involved in the creative process. “You don’t want to be talking about the money as you make music but this conversation needs to happen,” she said. 

 
  Producer, mixer and engineer Cameron Craig, executive director of The Music Producers Guild, says the data gathering process can be complicated by the use of multiple studios and engineers, and the fact that not all the information is collected at the mixing stage. But for him, the key issue is that “a lot of education needs to happen and session musicians need to get involved at an early stage.”

  Record producer Sylvia Massy concurred that the “studio is not an exclusive place any more” where music gets made. As a producer, her role is “to make sure credits are recorded” but due to the lower budgets, producers rarely have the means to keep an assistant on the payroll to write down all the credits as they happen. “So much data gets lost,” she said, acknowledging that "if credits are entered early we all get paid.”

 

 Artist manager Jr. Regisford, a principal at New Heat/New Heights Entertainment and co-founder/head of music of World of Dance Records, said it is often now the responsibility of the manager to ensure that all credits are properly entered. “I end up being responsible for helping producers track everyone down,” he said. “We have a template of what we need to get and we fill the blanks. It ends up being a group effort. Some producers are more on it than others, That’s how we do it, we piece it together.”  

  Labels have also a role to play. “As the label, we are really the receivers, the collectors, and the fact checkers of the information as it comes in,” said Craig Rosen, Executive VP of A&R at Atlantic Records. “We serve as proxy for the artists insofar as collecting credits for the artists. It is important that whoever receives the credits needs to understand that we live in dynamic world and first batch of data should be as correct as possible and then people have to adjust to that.”

This is an edited version of a story published by Synchtank's Synchblog.