Beginning today, DistroKid artists can send credits to streaming services.
This is an amazing service that's only available to DistroKid and our members. No other distributor offers it.
Background
If you're a musician and your music is on streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify, your distributor sends a very limited amount of information (aka metadata) about your music to these services.
Here’s what gets sent:
- Album title
- Song title
- Artist name
- General info like genre, language, and release date
- In some cases: songwriter, producer, and remixer
What’s being added?
DistroKid’s new service collects a bunch more metadata:
- Songwriters and whether they contributed lyrics, music, or both.
- Musicians and their instrument. Supports drums, bass, guitar, keyboard, kazoo, didgeridoo, triangle, flugelhorn, and almost 100 other instruments.
- Producers and beat makers.
- Designer of your album artwork, including photographer and graphic designer.
- Everyone else and their job. Arrangers, choirs, agents, managers, drivers, drum techs, hair stylists, and over 160 other predefined roles.
- The studio and information about where and how the music was recorded.
- Gear and equipment that was used. Artists can list all instruments, computers, software, and recording gear.
- Social media links including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and more.
- Contact information for booking, management, and general inquiries.
- Inspiration and musical influences that you’d like to share.
- Shout outs and thank you’s for anyone you want to acknowledge.
- Lyrics to all your songs. (We launched our lyric service a few weeks ago, but it’s relevant here too.)
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How will streaming services use this information?
It’s too soon to know exactly how it’ll all be used. But streaming services are getting serious about collecting metadata.
Even DDEX (the language that distributors use to deliver data to stores) is getting metadata-nutty with the recent introduction of RIN, a new standard that supports thousands of new metadata types. In their words:
There are a number of metadata elements that may be worth capturing. The richer the data, the better retailers can market the products—which can potentially increase the audience and revenue generated.
And we’re already seeing innovation:
- Spotify just announced that they’re going to show songwriter credits in the app
- Apple Music shows lyrics (and DistroKid lets you add lyrics).
- Tidal shows artists’ Facebook and Twitter links.
- Amazon Echo lets you find songs by saying, “Alexa, play the song that goes ‘Now I’m falling asleep and she’s taking a cab.’”
And this is just the beginning.
DistroKid’s new service is capable of sending an extreme amount of detailed metadata to streaming services.
Some streaming services can handle it all. Others only have the capability to accept a small portion for now—but likely more in the future.
DistroKid’s new service will monitor each streaming partner and continuously update them with the maximum amount of metadata they can handle at any time.
DistroKid’s goal is to help artists share their music with the world. We were the first distributor to offer unlimited uploads for one price with no commission. We were also the first to offer automatic royalty splits, instant verification on Spotify, lyric uploads to Apple Music, artist photos, free backups, and many more.
This new service makes a massive amount of new information available to streaming companies. Which they can use to build cool stuff. Which ultimately helps artists.
Adding credits is free for all DistroKid members.
Add yours now: https://distrokid.com/credits
