Free Updated Music Metadata Style Guide 2.0 From Music Biz
Music metadata is a boring topic, but a very important one. Today The Music Business Association (Music Biz) published version 2.0 of its Music Metadata Style Guide, which provides common naming conventions and data entry standards for music companies to use when listing, ingesting, and managing digital music. By following these standards, artists, labels and digital services can ensure that customers can easily find, stream, share and buy the tracks or albums they are looking for.
Compiled by Music Biz’s Digital Supply Chain and Operations Work Group, the updated document furthers the mission of the original, adding significant changes to standards for artists, albums, and tracks; providing more robust direction on DDEX standards; and adding Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai to the languages section.
“We have consistently said that the Music Metadata Style Guide is a living document, and with technology moving forward at an incredible pace, it’s important that we continuously update our baseline standards to account for these advances,” said Robby Towns, Director of Digital Strategy and Community for the Music Business Association. “It’s our hope that the industry will look to this document whenever they have a question about how to list a particular artist, album, track, or any other digital audio file. Without consistent, high-quality data, innovation in the digital music space will suffer, and we must help ensure that doesn’t happen.”
Version 2.0 is available for free and can be viewed here.
Thanks for posting this. I agree very strongly that many of these “behind the scenes” activities lack the thrill and excitement of creating music, but they’re definitely crucial if one wants to keep up in this constantly changing business…
Fascinating document- I agree that standardization of metadata is important, but I’d also mention that it can be very fun! At least in the world of librarianship, technologies like linked data/RDF, concepts like authority control and FRBR, and increasingly open data resources from the likes of Library of Congress and others show that metadata management is now more than ever a fascinating field with plenty of opportunities to roll up your sleeves and change how people think about information discovery and access. I think the music business and library communities have alot to offer and teach each other about metadata. If you think music metadata is boring, talk to a librarian and you might change your mind!
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Marina