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Metadata is an extremely important thing to understand as a musician, especially if you’re just starting out and don’t have anyone else to deal with it for you. It’s also one of those things that a lot of musicians either don’t fully understand or keep putting off learning about. To help you out, we’ve brought you this metadata guide from Musician and Marketing Consultant Solveig Whittle(@shadesofsolveig).
This is just an excerpt, but you can check out the full article over on Hypebot.
Metadata, also referred to as ID3 tag for mp3 files, is the identifying information associated with your song, such as the:
- composers
- performers
- song title
- title of the album on which it was released
- year released
- and so much more
Metadata is important for the following reasons:
- You want your name to show up in the key music databases, Rovi/Allmusic and CDDB/Gracenote as associated with that track. This is important because any music professional will use those databases to check you out and verify your claim to authorship or performance credit.
- If you plan to license your music for use in film or TV, it’s important that the use of your song(s) can be tracked for royalties, and metadata is how that is done. Your metadata must be entered properly in the publisher’s database in order for your royalties to be paid to them and to you. You probably will be giving the publisher a wav file at some point, but mp3s are often used for pitching your song.
- If you submit yourmusic to a reviewer or to a terrestrial or internet radio station. Whether you are working with a PR agency or going direct, your electronic press kit should contain mp3s of your songs that have the correct metadata, including album artwork.
Once your mp3 song file is properly tagged, the song can be uploaded to either the Allmusic or CDDB music databases and will link you by name directly to those music files. I wrote a post about uploading your music metadata to the CDDB database, which is pretty easy. Uploading to Rovi/Allmusic is a bit more complicated and involves sending in a physical CD.
Using Windows Explorer, iTunes Or GooglePlay To Edit Your Metadata
- You can use Windows Explorer, if you are using a Windows PC, to edit the ID3 metadata, by following the instructions here at Creative Worldwide Support.
- Many people use iTunes and already have it installed on their PC or Mac computers. There is a nice primer on editing your metadata using iTunes, courtesy of Disc Revolt.
- You can also edit your music metadata after uploading it to GooglePlay by following the steps outlined in this Google support article.
