
What is metadata, and what does it have to do with successfully navigating sync licensing?
When it comes to pitching for sync opportunities, it’s critical to make sure your music has accurate, complete metadata.
A big part of getting music licensed is building relationships with supervisors. Think of metadata as your first impression. And just as you wouldn’t show up to a job interview with cereal spilled down your front and no shoes on, you don’t want a music supervisor’s first experience of your music to be messy or nonexistent metadata.
“Tracks that don’t have metadata are like unassembled IKEA furniture without the instructions,” Lana Bui, a supervisor at Wildcard says. “Useless.”
“Bad metadata or no metadata makes me feel like I can’t trust them to understand a license,” Aminé Ramer, supervisor at States of Sound, told us. “It’s the 101 of music licensing.”
Having good metadata is “a time saver and keeps the detective work to a minimum,” supervisor Kasey Truman, from Chop Shop Music Supervision, says.
It shows that you’re serious about building the relationship, and about the music you’re sending. (For more on this, check out these tips from supervisors on sending new music blasts).
Once a supervisor has your music, your metadata is put to work and exponentially improves discoverability in future searches. While your odds of landing a sync the first time round might be pretty long, if your track appears again and again in future searches, your odds will gradually improve.
So, how do you get your metadata in order?
There are two key parts to getting metadata right: choosing the right file format, and putting the right info in the right places.
Choosing the right file format
When it comes to metadata, not all file formats are created equal.
Due to some unfortunate decisions made by IBM and Windows back in the early 1990s, .wavs, the most common high-resolution audio format, generally don’t carry metadata with them. Which causes a lot of confusion and concern. Some are confused why metadata appeared for a track in iTunes on one computer but disappeared when the .wav was sent to someone else. Almost all of the time, the culprit is a .wav.
If you’d like to send high-resolution audio, and have your metadata actually travel with it, your best bet is .aiff files.
.aiff is a hi-resolution, lossless format that supports ID3 metadata tags, the most commonly used audio metadata tags. Because of this fact, many sync companies phasing out .wavs and switching to .aiffs, and to help this shift, Disco.ac just launched a feature that will create .aiff copies of your .wavs in DISCO ?
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