It’s rare to find a band or recording artist not releasing at least some sort of music online, be it a single, some live tracks or a whole album. I’ve only booted up Kazaa twice since Christmas 2004 because these days you can compile a decent sampling of popular and independent artists every week via legal mp3s from labels (Matador is pretty good) or band websites, or review sites like Pitchfork.
It’s a hot topic, the evolution of the music industry, DRM, pirating, the changing role and form of the album. But I’m discussing legal downloads for now, in other words promotions in the form of a single available for download, the try-before-you-buy premise as old as radio, enticing you to buy more from an artist. So for your sake and mine, promote your product properly.
| Song Name | Artist | Album |
|---|---|---|
| Les Mouches – Carload of Whatever – You’re Worth More To Me Than 1000 Christ… | ||
| Close_to_you.mp3 | Les Mouches | Bloody Orgy ! ! ! EP |
| Track 01 | Artist | Album |
Sometimes all your info is placed in the Song Name field–song, artist and album, even the track number–and the other fields are blank. So then I have to go cutting and pasting into the proper fields. Or the filename has been substituted in the Song Name field, file extension and all. Or the album title contains a meta description of the album, such as EP or LP, that was never in the original. Then there’s just the real lazy (and most common), where the file name is completely nondescript (ex. 01.mp3) and there is no ID info whatsoever.
It’s as inept as say, Patty Schmidt on Brave New Waves airing an uninterrupted string of incredible new songs from three new bands you’ve never heard of, then informing us that the songs were Track One, Six and Live while proceeding to pronounce the band names with marbles in her mouth.
In all these cases I’m usually having to keep the browser window open where I downloaded the song from so I can alt-tab and cross-reference three times with iTunes to straighten things out. Or worse, the page I downloaded from has little to no pertinent info about the song, or how to spell it correctly, so I’m off in another browser tab searching through Amazon for the correct track order, spelling, etc.
Proper ID tags help us, your listeners, remember your name. They help us share your work with our friends without confusing who we’re talking about, listening to and swapping. A lot of us are downloading and trading dozens of legal tracks everyday, and not being able to clearly distinguish who/what/where we’re listening to certainly isn’t going to help us should we ever wish to actually buy some of your music.
And that’s just traditional (in the sense of listening to music on our computers, traditional) listening habits. These days when I import music into iTunes the program auto-copies the files to its own iTunes folder, then even more “conveniently” copies files into folders by artist and even album (ex. iTunes Music\The Dears\Protest\02 Summer of Protest.mp3) all of which is nice…
…except of course when the damn ID tag for a song was given about as much attention as my kitchen dishes, and so now I’ve got three different songs by one artist scattered across Unknown Artist and Unknown Album folders, making them, at the most, a pain to locate, backup, find; at the least, an affront to my sense of organization.
Additionally, myself and a number of my friends (and tens of thousands of users) log our music with programs like Audioscrobbler, a free online service that tracks our listening habits and displays our Top Artists and Recent Tracks for all to see, and thus share. But it gets tricky determining if Track 01-Artist-Album is the actual name of some post-rock, self-referential, shoe-gazing indy band or just some lazy indy band.
P.S. This goes for you too, podcasters and other spoken word mp3ers. I’m looking in your direction Benjamen Walker: toe_17.mp3? That’s it?
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