Eine kleine metadata

There’s been a fair amount of ink devoted to discussing classical music’s metadata problem, and even a couple of subscription services have emerged to fill that gap. And as many authors have noted, the failure of current metadata standards to properly tag classical music poses a large challenge to consumers looking for their favourite works, it also underpins a deeper financial issue: how can the performers get paid, if the system can’t tell the pieces apart?

Metadata is the information attached to a digital file that allows for its categorisation by digital services such as music players. For music files, this includes functional data such as file type, size, and encoding, as well as descriptive tags such as genre, artist, publisher, etc. However, standard metadata lacks a lot of detail that is necessary for accurately classifying classical music — for example, who is the artist? Is it the symphony orchestra? The conductor? The soloist? All of these factors are vital in identifying the piece, but aren’t present in the standard tagging format.

Classical music is an interesting case when discussing royalties, because so much of the work is in the public domain. Writing, publishing, reproduction — all those rights lapsed centuries ago. The only rights that matter, financially, are performing rights that should, in an ideal world, earn royalty payments for the performers of that recording.

A niche for every taste, a platform for every niche

As in most situations involving subscription services, some platforms have embraced the metadata issue as a USP. Idagio markets itself as “The Ultimate Classical Music Streaming App” and boasts differentiators like paying artists by the second, not by the play (important when calculating royalties from a 70+ minute symphony, expert playlist curation, mood-bases recommendations, and very granular cataloguing. It’s an impressive offering, but will the mainstream accept that inclusivity of a minority genre will require a threefold increase in metadata granularity? We’ll see.

The payment issue highlighted by Idagio is an interesting one, not only because of the play-length complications. With poor metadata, ensuring that the correct performer is paid for each play is challenging, to say the least. Even if a consumer asks for a specific version of a piece of music, they may not get the correct one — and if they do get the correct one, it may not be adequately tagged because the metadata cannot properly capture all the aspects. It’s frustrating, and is still causing problems — mostly because although musicologists have developed an extensive cataloging format, it’s too complicated for the needs of the pop-consuming majority, and devs don’t like complicating the database any more than they have to. With streaming services, the only record of a play is what’s in the system’s backend, and is shared with the PROs representing the artists. Metadata, quite literally, is money.

Strip the metadata, steal the royalties

A further complication of the classical music conundrum is that automatic music detection services can identify individual pieces, but not distinguish between recordings. This means that most, if not all current anti-piracy automation cannot police the classical catalogues.

This doesn’t just affect streaming services but also auditing radio playlists or background music — anywhere where the only form of proof of play are the records of the player. From unlicensed soundtrack usage and generic, monetised YouTube playlists, to muzak compilations and anonymised, possibly machine-collated “power relaxation” ambient videos, classical music can be appropriated with impunity. After all, how can a bot tell the difference between one version of Moonlight Sonata and another?

It’s a tough nut to crack. With a centuries-old corpus to draw from, it stands to reason that the differentiators between versions will be subtle — but it is that subtlety that inspires classical music buffs. Unfortunately, machine learning isn’t great with musical subtlety, and until we get music appreciation classes for AI, there’ll always be challenges.

Lowering the technological barriers

It’s not all doom and gloom for classical music lovers. At Utopia Music, we’re building a new generation of rights-management music monitoring tools. With sophisticated machine learning, and world-spanning listening nets, Utopia can tell who is playing what, when — almost anywhere. At Utopia, we believe in a better world for musicians and music lovers, where all actors are treated fairly, and where one play equals one pay, always.

Curious to know more? Join our Telegram group — UtopiaMusic or read more at utopiamusic.com