Metadata, as you hopefully know, is information that travels on your files. The quality of your metadata can impact massive success or miserable failure in the music industry.
Whether you are a sync agent, creator, A&R, publicist, manager, or radio promoter etc, you should care about the metadata on your files and consider it your responsibility to improve the quality of data related to your files that are floating through servers and hard drives around the world.
The most important thing is to make sure the data is clean, unique to each file and helpful!
This article provides a quick overview of each metadata field and the industry standard for filling them out.
<aside> 🕺🏽 Check out our metadata blog article for more helpful sync focussed tips
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IN THIS ARTICLE
Files are shared across the music and media industries for many reasons, each with special metadata requirements from mix versions to descriptive tags, rights ownership and contact info.
The creators or owners of an original file can save a lot of hassle & potential spread of incorrect data in the future by filling out useful metadata before sharing it. You can really help your partners to move faster and get their job done if you provide beautiful clean metadata from the beginning.
In general, you should think about why you are sending the files, how the recipient will store and use them, how the metadata looks, and how much you are (or are not) helping the people you are sending files to.
“Correct song title, artist, composer, and contact is the minimum, and anything extra is wonderful.... With DISCO, the tagging of genre/mood is becoming increasingly helpful as well for quicker searching.” - Kasey Truman Music Supervisor
Go over each field, add detail, clean up capitalization, excess characters from the creation process - like versions in the title (if they are no longer required or helpful).
If you are starting from scratch, add basic information: Title, Artist, Contact info (in Comments field), Artwork, Lyrics.