Dan Eno from the Future of Music Coalition, has done a great job at explaining the basics of metadata and why it is so important:

Well, as more and more of the music market migrates online, sales from services like iTunes or eMusic or Rhapsody or those yet to be created will represent a larger portion of total music revenues. Songs and albums are organized by these services according to their metadata, so it’s important that the cataloging be accurate. Otherwise, your new acoustic country record could get mistakenly filed in the alt-doom-emo-crunk genre and never sell a single copy.

And the problem is not only with genres, but also with artist and track names. Paul Lamere from MusicMachinery.com wrote last year about the many, many ways to spell “Guns N’ Roses”. Obviously, you would like your fans to find all of your music as easily as possible, so using the correct spelling is critical if you want to your online presence across all platforms to be a seamless experience, or in the words of Terry McBride from Nettwerk:

To make all of these applications work, you have to have really good metadata, which means that business has to focus its efforts on really good metadata. Rich metadata is going to work with all of these applications.

FUGA has specific features that will help you provide consistent, “clean”, metadata to all the online services that use your releases. For example, artist names are managed from a separate list and can’t be “just typed in”. It would be very easy to see if we have more than one spelling for a specific artist:

Screenshot of a managed list of artists

Before sending anything to an external service, FUGA does multiple other checks are on your metadata: presence of mandatory fields like Title and ISRC code, format checks for ISRC, UPC/EAN codes and checks for duplicates in your catalog, amongst many others.

Because of this feature alone we are always on the top list of preferred suppliers for the top online stores in the world.