NARM report: metadata...zzzzz...

META WORLD PEACE: On the day before the official start of Music Biz 2013, the entire day was dedicated to seminar sessions on metadata (not to be confused with the Met Gala; see 5/7 item below). Dry as dust, no doubt, but important stuff—and if it doesn’t happen at a conference like this, then when is it going to happen at all? The day was full of inviting summits like Transparency in Royalty Payments, Managing Photographic and Video Assets and What the Music Business Can Learn from the News Industry. Moderated by the Recording Academy’s Maureen Droney, the well-attended metadata panel discussed the benefits to consumer discovery as well as royalty concerns. Ivy Project’s Ivy Skoff and Sony Nashville’s Alison Booth kicked it off with the overview of the royalty side of how things get done in the studio, billed and paid. But Kevin Wyatt of All Music Guide parent company Rovi said that in the past, data from the labels could be quite “thin” because they were aimed at commerce rather than at consumers’ needs. Jon Maples of Rhapsody, the first service to adopt metadata for its catalog, spoke to the need not just to recreate the album liner experience of old but to offer something that would up the ante. No one had a time frame for this task getting done, and no one was ready to talk about who was going to pay for it, but the room was full of people who agreed it needed to happen. Although they all agreed that this sort of info is skewed toward an older demo (there was lots of jazz intel, for example), The Echo Nest’s Shane Tobin wasn’t quite as ready to concede the younger audience. I know that I, for one, felt older after a full day of dataspeak. —Mark Pearson reporting. (5/8a)