When Spotify announced Friday that it had added songwriter and producer credits to its desktop app, music fans had reason to rejoice. Not only were listeners now afforded one of the basic pleasures of physical liner notes on the largest subscription streaming music service, but adding credits might actually help Spotify turn the corner on one of its biggest ongoing struggles: how to identify and pay songwriters and producers, who increasingly work in elaborate assembly lines.

Alas, it didn’t take long before commentators noticed that Spotify’s credits are, as the Swedish streaming giant readily admits, “a work in progress.” Any database is only as good as its actual data, and what Spotify has offered out the gate isn’t always dependable. Right-clicking through Justin Timberlake’s just-released album, for example, the high-profile songwriting and production credits appear to be in order—there’s Timbaland, the Neptunes, Danja, Chris Stapleton—until you notice the absence of Toby Keith, who’s sampled and credited on Man of the Woods. As information service Music Ally points out, cover versions sometimes lack a credit for their originators on Spotify; some takes on the Bob Dylan classic “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” don’t attribute it to him. If Spotify can’t get the credits right on one of the biggest new releases of the year and one of the most-covered songwriters of the modern era, what hope do emerging independent artists stand? Browsing through Pitchfork’s recent Best New Track selections, it’s hit or miss whether a song will have full credits.

The reason for these gaps should be familiar to anybody who has tried to track down a perfectly reliable resource for songwriting and producer credits, which increasingly make news headlines. But there isn’t one. A couple of years ago, when composition credits for Frank Ocean’s then fairly mysterious new album Blonde turned up on the database for royalties tracker ASCAP, they ended up conflicting with what Ocean later published in the physical album’s liner notes. Just this week, after credits on Tidal and user-generated site Genius reportedly listed Dr. Luke as contributing to Iggy Azalea’s new Quavo team-up “Savior,” she responded in a pair of since-deleted tweets that the credits were wrong.

These are not isolated incidents. As music has gone digital, keeping track of who did what and figuring out how to pay them has ballooned into a problem complicated enough to resemble the financial industry. A few years ago, a study from the Berklee College of Music found that due to all this complexity, some 20 to 50 percent of music payments didn’t go to their rightful recipients. One-fifth to one-half! As recently as last year, reports still emerged of labels, publishers, and even Swedish songwriting titan Max Martin struggling mightily to, in essence, fix the industry’s digital plumbing.

Spotify clearly has a vested interest in these efforts. Last year, the streaming service agreed to pay $43 million to settle a class action suit by songwriters who claimed it didn’t properly license or pay them for their music. The previous year, Spotify struck a $20 million settlement in a similar lawsuit by the National Music Publishers Association. And as Spotify prepares to go public, it’s facing a $1.6 billion lawsuit from Wixen Music Publishing, which administers the rights to songs by Weezer and Tom Petty, among others. Wixen specifically claims that Spotify, “in a race to be first to market,” didn’t try hard enough to gather up data about songwriter credits. Almost four years ago, a Spotify executive told the U.S. Copyright Office that it wasn’t “possible or economically feasible to identify each co-author of a copyrighted musical work.”