Glossary · Technical
Metadata
Metadata is the descriptive and rights information attached to a release: titles, artist names, writer credits, ISRCs, the UPC, release date, genre and publisher details. Incorrect metadata is the most common reason royalties go unmatched.
Metadata is the only thing about your release that a computer can read. Streaming services, collection societies and rights databases have no way to listen to a track and work out who wrote it — they match on text and identifiers. Every royalty that reaches you does so because a string in one system matched a string in another.
The fields that decide whether you get paid are unglamorous. The song title, spelled identically on the release and on the work registration. The writers' full legal names, not artist names. Each writer's IPI and PRO. The split percentages, totalling exactly 100%. The ISRC of each recording and the UPC of the release. The publisher entity, if you have one.
Failure is quiet. Nobody rejects a release for having a blank writer field — the release goes live, the streams accumulate, and the composition-side royalties sit unmatched at The MLC because there is no registered work to attach them to. I have gone back through my own older releases and found tracks delivered with the songwriter credits simply missing, because at the time I did not know that field mattered.
Consistency across systems is more important than any single entry being elegant. "Bo Watson," "Boboy Watson" and "B. Watson" are three different people to a matching algorithm. Pick one legal name spelling and use it on your distributor delivery, your MLC registrations, your PRO registrations and your split sheets.
The misunderstanding: treating metadata as a marketing concern about genre tags and cover art. It is the plumbing of the payment system, and the most valuable hour you will spend on a release is checking it before delivery rather than after.
Check it before you deliver — fixing it afterwards means redelivering to every store. Artist's experience.
Related terms
- Unmatched royaltiesUnmatched royalties are royalties a collecting society has received but cannot link to a registered work or recording.
- ISRCAn ISRC, International Standard Recording Code, is a 12-character identifier assigned to a specific sound recording.
- ISWCAn ISWC, International Standard Musical Work Code, is a unique identifier for a musical composition, formatted as T followed by…
- Store deliveryStore delivery is the process by which a distributor transmits a finished release — audio, artwork, metadata and rights…
Answers that use this term
Definitions on this site describe the United States system. I am an artist who has been through this, not a lawyer.
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