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There once was a time when music recordings on LP albums came with little more than the artists’ names, song titles and the running times for each track, and those were pretty much arcane to all but disc jockeys who had to time the cuts they played. In fact, it wasn’t unusual to see album covers and dust jackets used as advertising real estate for other artists on the label. Even the name of George Martin, arguably the best-known record producer in the world (that has not been indicted on homicide charges), does not appear on Meet The Beatles. But by the late 1960s, the staff record producers and staff audio engineers were leaving their label gigs and going freelance, working at the wave of independent recording studios that mushroomed in the 1970s and ‘80s. Suddenly, the back of album covers became fountains of information, sometimes even densely encyclopedic in their comprehensiveness. Everyone, from the producer and engineers to guitar techs and roadies, to parents and deities, received profuse thanks in print. The arrival of the Compact Disc in 1982 compelled everyone to think small, as the outer dimensions of the package went from 12 X 12 inches of cardboard to the 5 X 5.5-inch jewel case. It precipitated a minor crisis at record label graphics departments. "There was this sudden and dramatic loss of packaging real estate," recalls Lou Vaccarelli, who worked as VP of production and manufacturing at BMG labels for 30 years starting in 1972. "Then the label legal departments also got involved, because there had to be certain minimum point sizes for the acknowledgements of sampled music information." The solution was to reduce fonts and enlarge printed insert material. But even that was not enough as Urban music formats made the use of multiple producers, engineers, programmers and recording studios common on records, and even all that additional information was further crowded by sampling credits. By the turn of the century, at a time when music itself was shedding its physical coil in favor of virtuality in the form of the digital download, the stage was set for a major conflict: more information than ever, and much of it critical for producers, engineers and studio owners to advertise their talents, but increasingly nowhere to put it. Now What?
To some extent, the same digital environment that created the problem offers some solutions to it. There are uncountable numbers of websites that purport to be repositories for the information that used to be on the packaging. Foremost among them is AllMusicGuide, owned by Macrovision (which also owns TV Guide) and which acts as the back-room metadata content channel for a number of online music distributors, including iTunes, Amazon, AOL, and others. While enthusiasts founded the site in 1991, corporate owners later made licensing that data the site’s core business. Data input is now done by staffers and a handful of expert music writers. But technical credits often remain elusive, either because the labels do not provide them or because there are no appropriate database fields in online resources for rubrics such as digital editing or programming. IMDB.com, the Amazon-owned film and television site, has drawn high marks for its granularity--if you have the unquenchable need to know who the stunt coordinator was in Thunderball, IMDB.com can tell you, and a premium subscription service it offers could also put you in touch with their agent. Earlier this year Amazon quietly launched Soundunwound.com. Currently in public beta, the site is a sort of social-networking version of IMDB.com and focused on the artists, but an Amazon spokesperson it has the potential to include all of the technical talent information. There are websites that focus on specific genres, such as www.dubcnn.com, where one can often find citations of samples in each song, as well as producer and musician information. Others are artist-specific, sometimes even down to a specific record; for instance, the Eagles’ Wal-Mart-only Long Road Out of Eden has spawned a fansite that maintains a credits list.
But the vast majority of websites below the few in the AMG or IMDB level are essentially wikis, with little in the way of organized fact-checking and often no direct contact resources. DIY Crediting
Issues such as these have prompted artists, producers and engineers to take matters into their own hands. Nine Inch Nails leader Trent Reznor put the credits and liner notes of his LP Teeth into the form of an "electronic poster," downloadable as a .pdf file from a URL printed on the package. Icelandic pop diva Björk, annoyed at miscrediting in the press, put a scan of the actual document used by the record label for packaging editorial on her own website. Some musicians and producers find that their best recourse is to establish their own websites for their discographies, such as this one for multi-instrumentalist session player Charlie McCoy and this one for producer/engineer Kevin Killen (Peter Gabriel, Jewel). Business managers for successful producers and engineers have realized that they need to go where the eyeballs are to keep their clients in the limelight. "I try to make sure that my clients’ Myspace sites get top billing on the MySpace sites of the artists that they are working with, and I regularly update their credits at All Music Guide," says Matthew Freeman, president of L.A.-based All Artists Productions, who manages producers such as ex-NIN member Danny Lohner (Second Hand Serenade). "Other than that there's not much you can do except monitor the trade ads for technical credits." Bennett Kaufman, principal at BK Entertainment Group in Los Angeles, which manages producers and mixers such as Steven Miller (Pink, Dave Matthews Band) and Don Gilmore (Linkin Park), does the same but also makes it part of the client contract. However, he concedes, "It's impossible to police all the third party sites, or to really enforce it." The music business version of the old Hollywood aphorism "You’re only as good as your last movie" reads: "You’re only as good as your next record." In the flux that is the music business now, getting that next record for many producers and engineers may rest on how well they can keep their credits available for the world to find. Dan Daley (danwriter at aol.com) is an experienced journalist and author, covering the business and technology of the entertainment industry for over 20 years. His work has appeared in numerous publications, both trade and general interest, including Billboard, The New York Daily News, Mix Magazine, GRAMMY Magazine, American Way, Spin, History Channel, TravelHost, International Business, USA Today, ArchiTech, and many others.
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