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Full credits have fallen to the wayside since digital downloads and streaming took over. Now, Warner Music is announcing a major step towards standardized music credits during the production phase.
The effort towards standardized credits is part of the Recording Academy’s Behind the Record campaign. The Academy’s social media campaign launched in October to raise awareness of full music credits for those who contribute to the song creation process.
Warner tapped music tech startup Sound Credit to help standardize its music credits at the point of creation. The Memphis-based company is also helping to tie the integrations into better royalty accounting and and payouts. Now, Blake Shelton’s “God’s Country” release is one of the first movers on the initiative.
The process works by gathering and entering all information during the recording of the track. Sound Credit then delivers that information to major labels – in this case, Warner Music Nashville. It’s delivered in a digital format called Recording Information Notification (RIN).
From there, the RIN information for each track can be delivered to streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. Pandora announced its support of full song credits back in October when the Behind the Record campaign launched.
“We believe in giving credit where it’s due. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Pandora now displays full song credits for millions of tracks in our massive music library, highlighting all of the people – both in front of the mic and behind-the-scenes – who played a role in the creation of your favorite tunes,” Pandora recently shared.
Standardized full credits can now be delivered from the production process to major labels directly. It’s a significant milestone on the road forward to keeping everyone involved in the creative process documented — and paid.
This development is essentially the start of end-to-end delivery for digital music credits. Now all we need are more digital streaming services committing to displaying full credits with their tracks. That also includes comprehensive songwriting and publisher details, a glaring absence that resulted in near-disastrous payout problems for platforms like Spotify.