In labeling music in my mp3 files sometime I find it difficult to figure out what name I should use in the artist category. This problem mainly occurs with classical, jazz, movie score, and Broadway show music. Things are pretty clear when it concerns pop and rock as long as you don’t worry about the writer of the lyrics and music, which is sometime different from the singer and/or musician.
In labeling classical, jazz, movie score, and stage music the conflict is between giving credit to the artist who wrote the music or the artist(s) that are performing the music. Take classical music for instance, do I give credit to the writer of the musical composition or the orchestra and conductor who are performing the piece in my mp3 files (or whatever format of compressed music file)?
For musical stage productions the matter is even more complicated than with classical, jazz or movie score. Do I give credit to the composer of the music, the performers of the music, or the characters within the play who perform the music?
Of late what I’ve been doing is giving credit to the artist that inspired me to purchase or copy the music. However, sometime I buy or copy music because I like the conductor and/or orchestra performing the music, sometime I buy or copy music due to the singer and composer and sometime I buy or copy music for all of these reasons. Who do I give credit to then?
I could in some way give credit to everyone by using the comment section available in some tags used with music files, but this is just too much writing. Who has all that time to label music like that?
I guess the best thing to do is to give credit the way the original source (the source which the music was converted to a compressed file from) of the music gives credit as much as possible, but as I said this could lead to excessive writing, which I don’t have the time to do.
I’ll continue to label my music files in a willy-nilly way until I decide on a system that works much better than any system I can think of now, so instead of saying the song “The Sound Of Music” from the academy award winning film of the same name is being performed by Julie Andrews or was written by Rogers and Hammerstein I’ll give credit to Maria.