<
https://www.wmot.org/roots-radio-news/2024-05-11/special-report-studio-musicians-are-still-waiting-for-credit-in-the-streaming-era>
"Dave Pomeroy is best-known as the genial president of Nashville’s Local 257 of
the American Federation of Musicians, a position he’s held since 2009. But set
that aside and focus on the fact that since the late 1970s, Pomeroy, now 68,
has been one of Music City’s most prolific professional bass players. He toured
or recorded with Don Williams, Chet Atkins, Trisha Yearwood, and many more. In
fact, according to the union’s database of studio sessions, he’s played on more
than 11,000 recorded songs since the late 1980s - and more before that.
But let’s go to the internet, where vast quantities of information are
reportedly available to us. According to AllMusic, among the most complete and
reliable sources for musician credits available free to consumers, Pomeroy has
played on just 366 albums. It doesn’t count song-by-song, but if he’d played on
all the tracks on all those albums (which rarely happens) he’d tally up at most
about 4,000 tracks. Remove all the duplicate compilation listings, and the
wrong number is even wronger. Still, AllMusic offers a reasonable record of the
impact that Pomeroy’s prodigious career has had on music.
On the streaming services though, where we fans and casual listeners access
music, Dave Pomeroy’s career nearly vanishes, even his history-making records
with Alison Krauss and Keith Whitley. Depending on which streaming service you
use, his resume is either woefully incomplete (200 total songs credited on
Tidal) or just unavailable (Spotify).
The music industry has been promising music credits on the streaming services
for more than a decade. They’re having another conference about it in Nashville
this week, where some well-meaning people will once again discuss the nerdy,
vexing challenge of “metadata.” To be fair, it’s not an easy problem, and the
business can point to some progress. But this report finds that in a world
where public-facing databases can track 20 million UPS packages a day, baseball
career statistics from 100 years ago to last night, and millions of global
Bitcoin transactions, musician credits remain incomplete and hard to access."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
