Dave Haynes

In my years of working in digital distribution I’m sad to say that I have had actual nightmares involving metadata. You’d be very surprised to see just how slack some labels are at being able to provide accurate metadata for their own content. So imagine the challenge when you throw that job back out to the general public. Two posts about metadata caught my eye this morning. Firstly a pure gem on the Last.fm blog which amused me with the Top 100 ways to write: Guns N’ Roses – Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (yes, there really is 100). And then a quick post on the Soundcloud blog about empowering their users to add their own metadata on the Soundcloud service (still in private beta but looking awesome so far.

It’s clear that music metadata is becoming increasingly important and all efforts to tame what is the stuff of nightmares are very welcome in my book. Will services likeLast.fm, MusicBrainz and Discogs lead the way in this area and what role should the actual content owners play in this?

UPDATE: just seen another funny post about metadata. Must have been having the same thought process at the same time!