Subscription-based streaming music service Rhapsody may change the way we discover music. By the end of 2013, the company will be the first such service to include digital liner notes in song data. Why do we care? Because by including digital liner notes, listeners will be able to search Rhapsody not only by song title and artist, but by all the contributors to that song as well, making digital music discovery exponentially richer.

The push by Rhapsody is part of a new campaign from the Recording Academy, the organization that puts on the annual Grammy awards. Called “Give Fans the Credit,” the idea behind the campaign is to use technology to bring liner notes to digital music discovery, which is becoming more important to the recording industry as consumers increasingly find new music from social networks, music blogs, and discovery services, rather than from retailers.

“Discovery is a key part of today’s digital music services,” says Daryl Friedman, chief advocacy & industry relations officer for the Recording Academy. “By knowing who wrote, produced, and played on the tracks, consumers will be able to discover even more great music.”

What are liner notes, exactly? Maybe you’ve never seen them because you never owned a vinyl album, where the concept originated and flourished. Liner notes made it to CDs in the form of those booklets where the pictures and lyrics live, but because of their small size, the print is often tiny and cumbersome. These days, however, you probably download or stream music, which means you rarely see information on songwriters, engineers, session players, background musicians, or producers. In case you’re unfamiliar with who these people are and what they do, here’s a breakdown:

Songwriter: Also known as a composer, songwriters write the actual music and/or lyrics for a performer. Example: Bruno Mars didn’t write “Grenade”–he just sang it. A man named Claude Kelly did the writing.

Engineer: An audio engineer uses their technical genius to operate recording equipment, mixing consoles, amplifiers, etc., to manipulate live sounds into what you hear in your headphones. There are studio/mixing engineers who work inside the recording facility, mastering engineers who make final adjustments to the overall sound of the track, and more engineers who coordinate the live sound you hear at shows.

Producer: Producers act as a project manager for the recording process. Phil Ek, producer for The Shins, Modest Mouse, and Fleet Foxes,describes the job this way: “A producer is the person who creatively guides or directs the process of making a record, like a director would a movie.”