The Credits Cure: ProMusicDB Builds a Better Mousetrap for Audio Pros

Time for producers and engineers to get credit where credit is due.

As everyone knows who has set up a microphone, mixed a track, or mastered an album – as does any musician who has ever recorded anything for that matter – getting a verified credit for your work seems to become harder in the digital age. The most visible repositories of credits, Allmusic and IMDB, are widely acknowledged to be incomplete and/or erroneous, and a central force to get this situation right was nowhere to be found.

Enter onto the scene ProMusicDB.org (PMDB), a highly ambitious non-profit undertaking that could change the credit dilemma for the better. Founded by the busy LA-based recording artist Christy Crowl, this is a platform that’s determined to be an agent of change: The first artist-controlled authority of music credits, PMDB enables songwriters, musicians, producers and engineers to take control of their credits, identity, metadata and digital legacy.

Since the music industry itself has all but surrendered in the face of the enormous task of acknowledging the efforts of music creators, PMDB is helping studio pros and musicians to take matters into their own hands. The key is the platform’s Digital Musician Companion tool, where members only need to input their basic information once, then can begin adding their credits and data to their personal archive. With a ProMusicDB.org URL, members can save their name and will be assigned a Unique Global Identifier to protect and validate their identity. In addition, ProMusicDB.org is offering personal data curation from Websites, which enables artists to clean up incorrect data about them in open source and proprietary databases.

ProMusicDB was founded on an entirely different philosophy for correct credits.

But Crowl isn’t doing this alone. As a project of the Pasadena Arts Council’s EMERGE Program and a founding member of the BerkleeICE Open Music Initiative, PMDB’s endorsers include the Professional Musicians Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians, SAG-AFTRA Singers, the Music Library Association, the Entertainment ID Registry Association, and the Wrecking Crew.

The Start: A Reasonable Doubt

Crowl’s impetus for embarking on this arduous journey launched from within the recording studio. “My inspiration began with playing on recording sessions and having my friends ask me why they weren’t getting credit for it! That came first,” she recalls. “Then, one of my closest friends is Scottie Haskell, a very talented singer and daughter of legendary arranger and conductor Jimmie Haskell. I learned that Jimmie’s scope of work was so vast that her family didn’t even have all of his work in one place. Among his many credits were 150 Gold Records, if you can even imagine that. But, there was no resource online that stored all of those credits—Discogs and AllMusic were not only incomplete, they were also incorrect. Even Jimmie’s website didn’t have everything.

“So I talked to Jimmie about it, and actually interviewed him, which I believe was his last on-camera interview. (Here is the link to that: https://youtu.be/iMNKZpJe3xw) He was very aware that all the results from “Google”-ing himself didn’t relate to each other, and there were so many errors online about him it was impossible for him to address them all.”

Once Crowl had that conversation with Jimmie, she noticed that the topic of credits kept coming up in every other conversation she was having with musical colleagues. So she reached out to some friends in the technology world to see if there was a vetted, authoritative resource for music credits, assuming there must have been a comprehensive resource she simply wasn’t aware of – and came up empty.

“Nobody had an answer other than the standard AllMusic or IMDB, which in the same sentence would get the ‘but they’re pretty inaccurate’ comment,” she says. “At that point I didn’t give up on somebody else already doing this, and thought surely music libraries must have some centralized resource for ‘real’ music credits information – so I talked with the head music librarian at the University of Southern California and asked what they used as a credits resource. I was surprised when she told me that music libraries, in general, were completely dependent on commercial databases the libraries license that they can’t contribute information to. It’s become a real problem in the archival community as well.

“Then I began to see just ‘not getting credit’ as a real problem,” Crowl continues. “It’s not just about getting credits right. It’s that information about music history isn’t even being saved in our music schools, for the next generation of musicians to learn about or even prove that being a ‘professional musician’ is possible.”

Before making the logical leap to PMDB, Crowl was careful to take the long view – first, she tried to make sure she was solving a problem that mattered in the long run. “But who really wanted to look up songwriters or producers or musicians who played on things? I thought. My generation, sure – but the younger generation I wasn’t so sure about,” she relates. “They haven’t had the experience of liner notes, or talking about musicians’ lives and stories the way that I did – so I didn’t really know if they were curious about music in that way.

“I found out a lot when I interviewed middle school students at Frost Middle School in Granada Hills, CA – mainly that music is really their life at that age, it’s what they talk about with their friends, how they cope, and how they learn life skills. (See one of Crowl’s interviews with two of the students here, and read the more recent article she wrote after visiting another class of students earlier this year here.) I have to say I was happy to find out that musical curiosity is not lost on the younger generation – what I was happy to hear is that they see musicians playing on television behind a big name artist, and want to find out who they are, and they can’t.”

Making the ‘Base

With the concept for a new credits resource formed and carefully researched, Crowl realized she’d need a team behind her, so she enrolled in the Stanford University Technology Entrepreneurship program online in the fall 2012. While enrolled, she created ProMusicDB.org as a course project and assembled her first team to work on it, fleshing out the concept and cycling through different business models.

“With the industry being in such disarray, we felt that developing another commercial database was not a solution,” says Crowl. “In addition, my friends in the tech and music industries invited me to participate in metadata working groups with MusicBiz, DDEX and other working groups and areas of the industry, because there were no artist representative entities in these meetings. I realized that this was a huge problem. I started off wanting to preserve music histories and get credit for musicians, but then realized that companies also don’t know how to ensure that artists get credit and get paid. In the bigger picture, not getting proper credit is actually affecting people’s lives.

“Moving forward I knew it would take a couple years to get off the ground, but I saw the logic and reason behind it, and I had this great tech team from the Stanford course, and we just kept going. The program ended in spring 2013 and we were ultimately one of a couple hundred projects overall, but we were one of the few singled out to meet with venture capitalists, even though we were publicly pursuing becoming a non-profit.”

Ultimately, Crowl decided that the for-profit model was incongruous with alleviating the tensions between artists and the industry. So PMDB became a fiscally sponsored nonprofit organization, with Crowl fully funding the development of both the digital platform and ProMusicDB’s organization. “ProMusicDB will probably be my life’s work,” she says, “and I am very happy to have had it find me to bring it out of the ether and into existence.”

Finding Their Own Lane

As PMDB transformed from a mystery into her life’s mission, Crowl understood that her platform would have to represent a sea change from currently available credit resources.

“There are, of course, numerous databases out there that have some information, but I believe at this point in the industry, after observing what I have, the only way to provide verified data and information about music is through the people who actually did the work on the music itself,” states Crowl. “So the concept of being artist-controlled rather than an isolated commercial database is important. We’re endeavoring to develop and create an organization that provides the platform from artists themselves, so they can maintain and control their own personal archives, take control of their digital identity, and repurpose that information as they need to in order to do business.”

Taking things one step further, PMDB is also providing a Personal Credits Curation service, for artists needing assistance in archiving large amounts of their own data. In this 1-1 process, PMDB assigns a Personal Credits Curator for the task of collecting information about a member from up to five disconnected data sources that exist online or offline, and consolidate them into their personal ProMusicDB archive and profile.

With a mess as big as credits have become – spiraling into every direction of cyberspace with no central force – Crowl acknowledges the music business’ desire to get it right, while being frozen in place by the enormity of the task.

“I think the industry has embraced the idea of a solution, they just don’t know where to begin,” she reasons. “My opinion of why the GRD failed, as well as other efforts in this area, is because the industry, mainly publishers, approached creating a solution from the top down, but not from the artist up. The wider industry needs a solution to this data problem, but haven’t wanted to involve the actual artists/producers/engineers in the process of that solution.

“I think in recent months with DDEX developing its Recording Information Notification (RIN) standard, that this concept of working with the actual people at ground level who are creating the music is becoming more popular,” continues Crowl. “But there’s still no database for that, which is how we envision ProMusicDB.org. We’re not out to take anyone’s position in the industry regarding how artists are paid or how data is monetized. But for artists, producers and engineers, there is a need for the centralization of their credits, digital archives, and metadata.

“We’re wanting ProMusicDB to be useful for marketing and commerce over time, so that an artist/producer/engineer isn’t just dealing with one entity to get paid and then going all over the Internet to correct and/or find corresponding data on the commercial database sites like AllMusic.”

While Crowl has come at this problem starting from the artist side, she’s seen more than enough to know that producers and engineers are just as keen to take control of their credits. “Absolutely — they really only have NARAS to help them out,” she says. “Only NARAS has no real business function in the industry regarding contracts and therefore, really don’t have leverage for negotiating getting credit, or saying where those credits are made available.

“Also, if there wasn’t widespread demand, the NARAS P&E wing wouldn’t have been involved with the development of the RIN standard, which is what they can do. But as it’s just a standard, and not an implementation, there still is a need for a repository for that data, which is where I think we can be a help for producers and engineers. We are compliant with the DDEX schema in the way we collect and relate recording credits and metadata.”

How PMDB stacks up versus other recognized credit sources.

Growing Global Access

Crowl and her team saw early on that being in it for the money would be a dead end for the project. Instead, PMDB was set up as a fiscally sponsored, nonprofit membership organization that is completely member and/or donor-supported. What members get in return is a digital platform, a personal data curation service, and educational tools that music creators can use to maintain their credits and digital archive and. Ultimately, Crowl believes that the endeavor will help make audio pros’ and artists’ business transactions simpler and more efficient in the new music economy.

Success depends heavily on getting the word out to the world at large, so that audio pros and artists can start building up the database. “In developing the larger non-profit organization that needs to exist to keep us going past what we can do with a membership-only revenue stream,” says Crowl, “I would hope that we could reach out within the music community to legacy artists, producers, engineers, etc., to contribute as pillars to the ongoing efforts of ProMusicDB. In return, I believe we can provide large-scale digital archival management services for these legacy artists that will help them take better advantage of the new technologies coming down the pike for the music industry.

“To that end, ProMusicDB has been green-lit as a considered project for Pepperdine University’s E2B program in the fall of 2017 to create the model for a personal digital museum for legacy musicians. So, I am actively pursuing what that model for sustainability would look like for us, and hope that it fills a need legacy artists have in the digital world that other organizations don’t quite fill.

“Sooner or later personal Websites will be shut-off, social media will change, who knows what will happen to parent companies of the AllMusic’s and IMDB’s of the world, and artists will need to have that complete informational record of their work in one place, under their own control.”

 Validation Workflow

Crowl is ready for skepticism about credit validation, but feels ProMusicDB has a strong process to respond with. “It’s something our team has spent a lot of time on and we have a pretty lengthy technical specification that can explain our ‘Digital Identity Governance for Music Professionals’ system in great detail. We actually filed a Provisional Patent on this specification and I’m happy to share all 54 pages of that with anyone who’s curious.

“The logic behind ‘DIG’ can be simplified by describing how we approach two different areas in validating a music credit – which are validating a name, or identity; and then validating the affiliation or relationship of that name/identity to a musical work and/or sound recording.”

The PMDB team was unpleasantly surprised to realize there was a problem in validating names and identifiers “at every level of the music ecosystem.” “There was a problem in validating names,” Crowl recounts. “You have musicians that have the same name, you have musicians who change their name over the course of their career, etc. – and to date there has been no system or identifiers in place that allow the artist to put all of this information into one place. Nor was there an ID system before ours that also asked the musician what affiliations they had to membership organizations — such as PROs, NARAS, and Unions, etc… — and what they were, and made that available to other membership organizations to make sure that musicians belonging to more than one organization could at least be correctly identified between the organizations that represented them.

“So, we developed the ProMusicDB ID for our members, which is a Globally Unique Identifier that is meaningful and not just a random number like other identifiers, based on creating a ‘number identifier’ that can validate a person’s name based on their affiliations, and a few other key factors like where they were born, their normal ‘role’ in their career like producer, guitar player, etc…, and their birthplace.”

Validation of the affiliation of that name to a musical work and/or sound recording starts with the artist themselves. “We know who they are, know their affiliations, and they have a ProMusicDB ID which we can use to make some basic assumptions about their work – and therefore, from a technological standpoint, we can have a certain level of confidence that the information they add into the system will be true to the best of their knowledge, which is also something a member agrees to when they join ProMusicDB.

“To add another level of confidence and validation, we are integrating DBpedia — the raw data for Wikipedia — and MusicBrainz, and a member has the opportunity to search for their name and/or titles they should be affiliated with from those datasets. So, the artist is validated with their own ID, then they have the opportunity to search for other considerably valid data in DBpedia and MusicBrainz about them, or to correct what is wrong, or add what should be into their ProMusicDB profile.

“What this allows us to do is add another level of confidence to the validation of the credit. As we grow and progress, I would hope we could integrate more and more databases and then have those sources accept our data to make their consumer databases congruent across the board.”

In a show of exponential force, Crowl expects the organization will be increasingly able to add more levels of confidence to their data, since each integration provides further confirmation that the affiliation and credit is true. Members are also offered a personal and private archive and the ability to relate any kind of file to their credit including pictures, concert program pdf’s, DAW files, directly to that credit. The files are not public, but can help a member with the practical benefit of keep all of their digital artifacts organized.

However, the private archives also have a public-facing purpose. “What this ‘archiving’ also does,” Crowl says, “is allow us to add a confidence level to the credit – because if someone has uploaded a picture, a Pro Tools file, or a concert program to a credit in their archive, chances are, it is ‘true’ in validation terms.

“So, the way we’ve designed our system is that the more ‘archiving’ a member can do, the more ‘confident’ their credits are in our system. This subject would probably take a whole interview unto itself!”

Enrollment is Now Open

ProMusicDB launched with open enrollment for Founding Artist Members, who will always have the highest level of access to ProMusicDB, on September 28, an initial launch period which will close November 30. The membership fee for PMDB is $97 per year, is tax-deductible. If a new member wants help in setting up their profile and with an Internet search for credits and consolidation, PMDB offers the services of a Personal Credits Curator for $247.

ProMusicDB founder Christy Crowl

“This is a personalized service where we will take up to five sources of credits that exist about you online or offline, and consolidate them into your ProMusicDB profile, as well as give you a hard-copy of all that information for you to keep in your private archive and/or offline,” explains Crowl. “The Personal Credits Curator also includes six months of ‘Credit Keeping,’ like bookkeeping,’ where a member can send their calendar or their gigs a couple of weeks and we’ll put them on their profile and onto their archive document, so they’ll always be up to date.

“In addition, membership to ProMusicDB is similar to a membership to NARAS, the SCL, etc. – only we are gearing our mission towards assisting music creators in the new digital world. First we have a platform for credits and an identifier system, then we have educational programs that will be free for members to keep them up to date on the new music business, available via Webinars, etc…, and lastly we desire to be the entity that preserves legacy as an artist desires – because ultimately Websites will be turned off, social media will change, and there needs to be a place for all this information to live on.” (A full informational Webinar and site demo can be seen here.)

This Data Makes A Difference

With so much information missing or incorrect, Crowl has high hopes that ProMusicDB.org has gotten the formula right by deploying a platform that truly empowers music creators.

“The key to successfully managing credits and metadata is getting those credits from the music creators/producers/engineers themselves in a validated way — which we can do — and I think it’s also important to educate music professionals on how and why data is now running the industry.”

As Crowl points out, conquering the credits problem is about more than just seeing one’s name spelled correctly in the proper place – there’s actually a lot more at stake here. “I believe a producer’s data is not only the key to preserving his or her legacy in the digital world, but verifiable data is the key component necessary for future technologies — like blockchain — to work effectively for the music industry.

“In my opinion, no one else is really able to collect data about a music creator all in one place other than the creator doing it themselves, or having an entity like ProMusicDB work in partnership with them to make sure their data and digital legacy is personally managed, with an outcome as correct from the source as it can be. Business managers or service providers might do some of this, but it’s only for their side of the coin – not the preserving cultural legacy aspect.

“Ultimately, by working with music creators on a very personal level to create their digital legacy, we are also educating them on what they will need to do in order to ensure proper credit, proper alignment with standards, etc. – and that will help them prepare for the future changes that are coming in digital commerce.”

It’s a massive task, but someone has to do it. With Crowl’s method, engineering, mixing and mastering credits will be communicated intact and preserved indefinitely thanks to the collective efforts of those involved – to the benefit of all.

“I believe both the necessary business ‘data management hub’ for artists and the necessary invaluable cultural resource for preserving music legacy can co-exist in an entity that is artist controlled, artist contributed, and artist serving,” she affirms. “That is the ‘why’ behind a musician taking an alternate route from a music career to doing something for music’s sake. I know in my heart it’s needed in the world, and hopefully now is the right time.”

• David Weiss

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