Rhapsody has stepped forward as the first digital service to support the Recording Academy’s initiative to report full credits for tracks. Will it have an impact on dance music?
The Recording Academy’s Give Fans The Credit campaign, launched nine months ago, advocates the inclusion of credits in digital music for all songwriters, producers, engineers and non-featured performers such as session musicians and backing vocalists. The aim is to match the quality of information provided in (some) physical liner notes.
Greater transparency around who contributed to a track is no doubt another step in the race for every digital music service and their dog to innovate in music discovery (Twitter #Music, Spotify & Tunigo). Allowing people to browse tracks by each of their composite music-makers does open up avenues for finding new music.
But whether the idea is particularly relevant to dance music is an entirely different matter. Dance music is already producer-led, with a focus on auteurs who handle virtually every step of the creative process alone. Unlike in most pop, the artist and producer are often synonymous. One could argue, then, that the need for credits is less of an issue in dance than it is in the mainstream charts where consumers buy into a face, an image or a brand and are perhaps less likely to explore where the music came from creatively. However, it can’t be ignored that in recent years dance has fed more into the mainstream, with interesting results. Calvin Harris is credited as a featured artist on Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’, for example (Harris wrote and produced the single). And who’s to say fans of Guetta’s ‘Little Bad Girl’ won’t go on a creative pilgrimage through co-producer Giorgio Tuinfort’s back catalogue? Hmm.
Consumers aside, what benefits might the campaign have for dance artists? While producers are more visible in dance than in pop, developments in production software and digital media have meant that collaborating remotely is more widespread, and tracks increasingly hail from more than one creative source. Getting your name down on a track’s digital identity could save beef and grief from future fall-outs with creative partners (à la The Weeknd and Jeremy Rose circa 2012).
Perhaps the biggest impact from the Give Fans The Credit campaign, then, will be the encouragement for artists, writers, musicians, engineers and producers to formalise their credits on digital releases. Electronic artists are notorious for missing out on royalties – only 15% of set lists at Glade 2011 were submitted for royalties, while 90% were submitted at predominantly guitar-based Reading Festival. Initiatives such as PRS’s Amplify and Give Fans The Credit may serve to remind dance artists to formalise their digital music footprint. Dance music distribution is increasingly fractured and fragmented, with artists often circulating their work through various channels long before it reaches formal streaming or digital download avenues, but if streaming takes off in the way the majority of the industry expect it to then accurate credits may turn out to be one of the most important factors in ensuring artists get paid fairly for their work.