[Chicago Sandy]

We have a Red Book master for our next full length CD, but.......

Indications are that in the very near future, when it comes to community and other small radio stations with limited space for physical record libraries, the norm for music libraries will be lossless digital formats with full embedding of metadata--not just title, artist, label and copyright but also lyrics and all recording credits from engineering to studio musicians. Currently, Soundexchange, which pays streaming and satellite royalties to performers and sound-recording-copyright holders (labels or self-releasing artists), cannot pay studio or side musicians on recordings without that metadata. And, as on our two recordings in current release, we have some truly kick-@$$ studio musicians on our newest soon-to-be-released one.

However, our engineer will not include metadata in the Red Book masters, claiming that the only thing necessary is Gracenote DB registration. No amount of pleading will convince him otherwise. It's as if I'm talking Martian. Sonically, he is a terrific mastering engineer--the only one I've used who gets the difference between tracking, mixing and mastering and does them all wonderfully.

He has pleaded with me not to let anyone touch the masters save to press from them. But once it's released, there's no going back to enter the foregoing data; and I want to make sure that everyone the law says is entitled to streaming royalties gets them. Not just that, but as has been pointed out: how would you feel if you went to the Louvre and instead of seeing the Mona Lisa, you saw a copy of it--with no info as to when and how the copy was made or who made it? (The reason for a lossless format is that a compressed format is akin to Xeroxing the Mona Lisa).

I am inclined to ask around t mastering houses to see whether they would be willing to simply insert the metadata without messing with any of the audio, and if so, to get price quotes. I don't want to hurt our engineer's feelings (and I hope he's not on the AGF!), but I don't want to release an otherwise no-apologies record with something missing.

What would you do?