Metadata is the biggest little problem plaguing the music industry
theverge.com
theverge.com
>The musician who was owed $40,000 missed out because a glitch between two databases removed many of his credits. It wasn’t the musician’s fault, but too much time had gone by before anyone noticed. The companies involved declined to pay him.
If the people who owe the money overtly don’t care about doing the right thing, which seems to have been the typical attitude since the recorded-entertainment business was invented, who’s going to be able to fix it? Seems like this is working exactly as designed.
"Definitely do NOT pirate this material just because I won't be paid either way, it's still illegal! I cannot be more clear on this to you, my fans who normally pay for my music"
When running a service business the best decision I made was using a factoring service from Welles Fargo.
Big company might specify NET180 on a big contract and still not have remitted payment 200 days in. If you are a small company your recourse is to sue.
If you have a big bank handling accounts receivable they call on day 181 and tell the company that their credit rating is taking a hit for not making payment on time.
Payment gets made. Big companies like good credit ratings, they don’t like paying more to borrow money.
Seems like there is a market opportunity for artists to have a financial partner handle collections on their behalf.
As the quote goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" - I'm confident that things would be entirely if the industry suddenly found it in its best interest to become tech savvy.
But as long as lobbying is a thing and those companies have a deep pocket I have no expectations that a solution (which I'm sure already exists) will be implemented.
The music metadata situation is pretty bad, but the source of the problem is not really carelessness or greed or avoidance of responsibility (although those are all true). The true source of music metadata complication is the insanely complex copyright regime that music operates under. It's a legacy codebase about a century in the making that is constantly being patched up by congress, mostly by trying to change who is being protected from whom. (Among the folks favored at different times: labels, publishing companies, performing artists, song writing artists, radio stations, streaming music services, live venues, ...).
Perfect compliance with these laws is effectively impossible, so everyone is just doing the best they can. And any attempts congress makes to change how things work end up being gigantic legal battles because it's a zero-sum game and the more money in the "right" hands (e.g. these artists being ripped off) is less money in the other "right" hands (e.g. the unprofitable streaming service we all love).
Strictly just pasting it into a song and selling it wasn't legal (presumably after this went viral somebody paid Trent Reznor a bunch of money and put his name in the metadata to avoid nasty legal consequences) but everything up until selling it was legal, all the raw PCM data you'd want to take the samples apart without painfully cutting it out of the entire Ghosts recording was uploaded with the Ghosts I-IV album as CC-NC-BY. This is how our culture was _supposed_ to work if we weren't still trying to find ways to put more money in The Man's pocket.
Because that example is a really weird grey area. The label didn’t clear one of the most obvious samples of all time. The original artist did not prevent them from releasing the derived work, but Tribe didn’t get paid for one of their classics.
I’m not sure what to think of that story.
Oh, you'd be amazed...
Based on my tangential experience with this part of the industry... it absolutely is not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_rights_organisatio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_rights_management
What's a hash of the work? Lyrics? Original score sheet (if there is any)? Any combination of the two? The first studio recording? Some songs may list a dozen collaborators, how's that attribution gonna work?
What's a hash? A hash of the resulting wav? mp3? flac? alac? any combination of the above? hashes of individual instrument tracks?
At which point does a song stop being derivative and becomes an original song (or music in general, see "Dies Irae" for example [1] or even Star Wars [2]). Who and how keeps track of attributions when lyrics are written by one person (or people), music by another, and performed by dozens of different performers over the years? How are collections tracked and attributed (an opera is a collection of musical performances viewed as a single work)?
These are just some of the problems people that try to track and attribute music face today. And they are not going to be magically solved by a "publicly auditable, immutable data store".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_irae#Musical_quotations
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/arts/music/star-wars-soun...
For the first part(the nature of the "hash"), there should obviously be standards to address these questions. An official recording could be identified by a hash of the actual recording in some standard format(e.g. raw wave files).
For distribution of score sheet and lyrics, those can be treated separately and have their own hash identifier according to their own standard.
The rest are philosophical and legal questions that are orthogonal to the technical problem. The point of the suggestion, is to address the technical side of the problem.
Having an open platform where authors/copyright owners can hold public records of their copyrighted works and their distribution, and point to it as legal evidence, would certainly be useful, don't you think?
That's the problem: you're addressing the most boring and the least important part of the problem that has already been solved. No one in this world has any trouble tracking and attributing songs once a song's metadata is correct. And providing correct metadata is the entirety of the problem which you just glossed over as "philosophical and legal questions that are orthogonal to the technical problem". They are not.
If it was entered wrong, you can issue a correction, but a trace of the first, wrong value will stay available.
That means nobody can just say something was never what it was, just that it changed(and then have to justify why).
In case of music assigning ISBNs to CDs doesn't really work because people more often than not listen to, stream and broadcast individual tracks. And there's no global ID system for individual tracks. This becomes even more messy when you consider that "Original performance 1983", "remastered 1994", "best of 2003" and "Japanese Christmas Special 2013" are all different tracks (even if it's the same track with the same song), often has different distributors and rights holders, and people will fight to the death defending a particular version :)
[1] Audiobooks are a slightly different beast, but they are still much easier to match to an author.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Recordi... is exactly this, no?
How do you hash the audible result, in a reproducable way? I'm not trying to bash on the idea mind, I just think this is an interesting problem and I'm curious if solutions already exist. Surely Shazam and the like have to be doing something in this vein.
I believe gracedb has this; we’ve had decent audio fingerprinting for a bit now.
Blockchain?
Enter Passport by Mycelia[0]
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