Songwriters: Are You Using The Power Of Metadata?

Let’s talk about a powerful tool that I use daily in my songwriting life, Metadata. Metadata is the key to mastering your song catalog and making better pitches. It organizes your songs and helps you target with what they’re looking for. And most importantly, when you send your song to a publisher or producer or a manager, someone in the music business, metadata ensures that your contact information never gets lost.

Chapters:

Chapter 1: Why use Metadata?

Chapter 2: What is Metadata?

Chapter 3: Why should you add comments in your Metadata

Chapter 4: Types of music files

Chapter 5: How to add Metadata

Chapter 6: I have Metadata on my songs, now what?

Chapter 7: Reminder

Chapter 1: Why use Metadata?

If you get the opportunity to pitch a song, having the ability to quickly pull up what that artist is looking for is a great asset. Also, if you’re like me and you have songs you’ve written two or three years ago and they’re not fresh in your mind, this is a great way to keep your songs organized. Metadata is going to help you pull up songs quickly and get them out, so you don’t miss an opportunity when it comes up.

Chapter 2: What is Metadata?

What is metadata? Metadata is the information that’s contained within an audio file. I know that a lot of you have used iTunes, so let’s just look at iTunes. iTunes is a very basic form of metadata, but iTunes will let us get creative with our catalog and do some things that are going to help you.

Let’s look at iTunes. Let’s just type in an artist, say Andy Griggs. First song has the title, the length, it’s 3:59. The artist, the album, the composer, and co-writer information. You can also put BPM and in the last section you can add comments.

Chapter 3: Why should you add comments in your Metadata?

Comments are really going to allow us to do some neat things with organizing our catalog. In the comments you can put contact information. Imagine how awful it would be if you got an opportunity to pitch a song and it somehow makes it to a manager of a major artist and they’re digging it. They download the song onto their computer and then a few weeks later they come back and they’re like, wow, what was that song? They pull it up but can’t find your contact information because there’s no metadata on the song file. How awful would that be?

Chapter 4: Types of music files

We’re going to teach you how to input your metadata and contact information correctly on your song files. Let’s talk about the three major file formats. There’s MP3, WAV file and AIFF files. Those are the three that we mostly use in the music business.

I’m going to throw out WAV files because WAV files do not allow you to input metadata. Now MP3 files, they’re great. They’re small files that you can send. They’re the files that songwriters use the most because we can email them quickly. They don’t take up a lot of space and we just use those the most. My publisher gets MP3 files for my demos, he mails out the demos to record labels and artists, and everybody’s flying around with MP3 files. So, in the music business for metadata, MP3 files is really the way to go.

The downside of that is MP3 files are compressed so that they don’t take up a lot of disc space and so, they don’t sound as good as an AIFF file. AIFF files you can embed metadata and it’s great. I know a lot of guys in the sync world that use it. AIFF files are master quality files and I encourage you if you want to do sync, having your catalog with both MP3 files and the AIFF master files as well.

Chapter 5: How to add Metadata

I’m going to show you how to place metadata into your audio file. iTunes is great for this. I’m going to start out with a blank playlist in iTunes. I’m going to call this “Clay Mills Demos”. I’m going to go over to my desktop and I’m just going to drag over a couple of songs.

Okay, let’s start with artwork. I always like to have a little photo on my MP3 file because I want it to look a little more professional and it’s more interesting to have a photo than just have one of these blank MP3 generic images.

My publishing company is VibeCity. Let’s go to the details and type in the Album, Artist, Composer, Producer, Genre, (Year : I never use year because in the demo world, if I’m sending out a song I wrote two years ago, I don’t want to give someone a reason not to record the song.) I then add BPM, lyrics and I also like to include at the bottom of the lyrics my contact information.

Last but not least, this is hugely important, the comment section. Now, this is crucial for organizing my catalog and yours too. Say for instance, I heard last week that, Darrius Rucker was looking for a fun up-tempo show opener. How do I quickly find that in my catalog? By looking in the comment section.

In the comment section I will put things like fun, up-tempo, show opener. If it’s a male only song, I’ll put “male”. If it’s a song about a party, I’ll put “party”. And then, last but not least, I want to put my contact information in there.

Chapter 6: I have Metadata on my songs, now what?

This is where the fun stuff happens. We’ve got our songs in iTunes, we’ve got the album, artist, genre, tempos, key words, and comments all in the meta-data. When I send or paste the songs back into iTunes, all that information is showing up, nice and neat. Anyone that is looking at these files, it’s all right there on the file that you emailed them, and they’ll be able to listen to it. They’ll be able to see who the artist is, the genre, the tempos they’ll be able to look and find your contact information, everything is now on that audio file.

Also, now that my songs have metadata and are in my catalog, if someone says an artist is looking for a fun, up-tempo show opener and it’s for a male singer. I’ll go into my catalog, and I’ll type in the search bar, fun or up-tempo or male. If you have 200 songs, it will pull up only the songs that have “fun” or “up-tempo” or “male” in the metadata, so you don’t have to listen through all 200 of your songs.

Chapter 7: Reminder

Remember, the comments section in iTunes is kind of like Twitter. It only allows you so many words. So, make sure you’re not typing and it’s not going in there. You want to be aware of that.