Stand Up And Be Tagged
This morning I made a statement:
Followed by another:
While those statements pretty well sum up my opinions I thought maybe I should expand upon them a little bit because I want to make it clear why it is important.
Imagine you bought a CD through the mail, when you opened the box the CD, book and jewel case were all separate, the track listing and spine had a blank spot for you to write the titles in yourself.
By not properly tagging your MP3s you are putting the end user in the position of finishing the job. When they import them into a MP3 player or library program they come in as a jumbled mess, they are left with a folder of “Unknown Song” by “Unknown Artist” and every track is #0. If they would like the artwork displayed it is their responsibility to add it.
Personally I often end up discarding MP3s that are not tagged properly and from people I have talked to I am not alone in this. Unless I already know an album well and know it is worth the effort generally I do not bother. With the massive amount of netlabel material on the web it is simply not worth the effort for me to attempt to properly tag everything that I end up downloading. Even listening to releases to figure out what is worth tagging becomes a chore as the tracks are not even separated by album and are not in the proper order.
Properly tagging and labeling your releases puts the final sheen of professionalism on your release. The battle that netlabels have is already an uphill one. You are competing against ever other piece of media on the internet, why give the user one more excuse to tune out?
Musicians, this is too important to just leave to the labels.
Labels, this is too important to just leave to the musicians.