Are there standards for track-level artist metadata for musicals?

August 6, 2018 12:00 PM

I'm quite fond of the original concept recording of Jesus Christ Superstar (a.k.a. the brown album). Are there official standards for how to do track-level artist metadata for musicals?

One option is to set the "artist" tag to "Cast of Jesus Christ Superstar", but that feels boring. I could list each performer on each track, but I'm unsure of the ordering convention (is it alphabetical by last name? order of appearance in the track?). When there are multiple names, are ampersands preferred or "and"s? Do I put the chorus and orchestra into their own groupings?

As it's just for me I know this ultimately comes down to personal preference, but I'm curious if official standards exist and what they might be.

posted by mrbeefy to Media & Arts (2 answers total)

At least in iTunes, there's both an "album artist" and an "artist" tag, so you could set the former to "Cast of Jesus Christ Superstar" and still label individual performers per track using the latter.

For the order... looking at the only musical cast album I have that I've bought directly in digital format (and thus the only one that comes with pre-filled metadata), it appears to list performers in order of appearance in the track, separated by commas and with an ampersand instead of the comma before the last one. It also does include a "Original Broadway Cast of [musical]" in the performer listing for numbers that include the ensemble.

I have absolutely no idea if official standards exist, though!
posted by sailoreagle at 12:21 PM on August 6, 2018

Best answer: I try not to overthink this too much but if you want to go down this particular rabbit hole here are some starting points:
Official MusicBrainz Style Guidelines
Tag Frame Reference
posted by Bangaioh at 1:09 PM on August 6, 2018 [1 favorite]