Digital Asset Management

Five years ago, digital was an afterthought for most record labels.  Unless they were big enough to get a direct deal with the retailers (e.g. iTunes) most went with a digital distributor/aggregator.  As nobody really knew what a distributor did, the decision of who to go with was usually based on personal relationships and recommendations more than anything else.  Very few people knew what was going on and placed a lot of faith in distributors to handle everything for them.  What many people may have not realised is that the distributors were, for the most part, making it up as they went a long.  That’s not to say that the distributors were taking people for a ride – they were doing the best they could to help out labels in a truly confusing time.

Now, 5 years on, the dust has started to settle.  Talk to anyone in the independent music industry and most will be able to tell you who are the most reliable digital distributors.  Personal relationships still play a big part, as they should, but with the knowledge now available and many important lessons learned, you are less likely to end up getting burned.

Having said that, it is time for record labels, and anyone else who owns recorded music, to take responsibility for their own digital assets.  However solid your current setup may seem, these are still uncertain times.  If your distributor disappeared tomorrow, how long would it take you to get everything back up and running?  Don’t get caught with your drawers down!

As far as digital retail goes, there are three important types of asset that you must take care of:

Audio
Album artwork (packshots)
Metadata

Audio

FORMAT

Audio should be stored in an uncompressed format (no mp3s here please!).  That means .WAV files.  WAV files can be converted to any compressed format (mp3, wma, aac, etc) so you are ready for anything that could be thrown at you.  It’s the digital equivelant of that dusty shelf in the corner of the office containing all your CD masters.

NAMING CONVENTIONS AND FILE STRUCTURE

The audio files must be named in a meaningful way that can be understood by anyone.  Everyone has their own slightly different way of doing this, but you should essentially name each track with three elements:

barcode(UPC/EAN)
disc number
track number

Like this:

5103462467956_01_001.wav
5103462467956_01_002.wav
5103462467956_01_003.wav
…
5103462467956_02_001.wav
5103462467956_02_002.wav
5103462467956_02_003.wav
etc

The underscores can be replaced with hyphens if you wish, but you get the general idea.

Store these files in seperate, barcode-named folders.  For example, the audio files in the example above would be stored in a folder named ’5103462467956′.

STORAGE

Everyone has their own way of storing things, whether it’s on a server, on the local hard drive of someone’s computer or on external hard drives.  However you do it, you must make sure that the storage location is secure, safe from accidental corruption and easily accessible.  Setting up a server is beyond the scope of this article so, if that’s completely alien to you, I would recommend getting hold of an external hard drive with plenty of space (you can pick up a 1TB drive for next to nothing these days).

BACKUP

Storing your audio in a safe place is all well and good.  But accidents DO happen.  Don’t think they won’t happen to you.  It is essential that you create regular backups of everything on that hard drive.  Again, the ins and outs of backing up are beyond the scope of this article.  We’ll write that one soon but, in the meantime, there is plenty of useful information on the net about how to do this at little or no cost.  Here’s a great article to get you started:

Geek to Live: Automatically back up your hard drive

You’ll need something to backup to, so you can add another external hard drive to your shopping list.  Trust me, it’s worth it!

Album Artwork (Packshots)

As with audio, it’s important to store your artwork in a universally recognised format as well as in high quality to ensure you can handle any eventuality.

FORMAT

Whatever application you or your designer is using, you will have the ability to save image files in .JPG format.  This is the format that all digital retailers currently accept so it’s a safe bet.

You should save the images to the following specifications:

Dimensions: 1400 x 1400 pixels
Resolution: 300 dpi (dots per inch)

Most decent image editing applications (e.g. Photoshop) will let you choose the level of ‘quality’ you wish to use.  You should always choose the highest quality.

While not essential, it’s also a good idea to store a lower quality version of the artwork.  This can come in handy if you just need to send someone the image and quality is not important.  There’s no point in attaching a large 2MB file to an email if it’s not necessary.  A good specification for these lower quality files would be:

Dimensions: 600 x 600 pixels
Resolution: 72 dpi

NAMING CONVENTION

Quite simply, name the artwork files with the product barcode.  For example:

5103462467956.jpg

Store the files in one folder named, for example, ‘album-artwork’.  If you are storing lower quality images as well, create a seperate folder for those and give it a meaningful name.  For example, you could have two folders named as follows:

album-artwork-300dpi (for your hight quality images)
album-artwork-72dpi (for your lower quality images)

STORAGE

Again, like audio, you must store your artwork files in a secure location.  I would recommend that you store the artwork folders in the same place as the audio.

BACKUP

Yep, you guessed it.  We need to back these up too.  If you have your artwork stored in the same place as your audio, the backup process will be exactly the same.

Metadata

When thinking about the storage of your metadata, there are several important things to consider:

- What kind of data to store
- How to store the data
- Where to store the data
- The ability to supply the data to anyone who needs it in the format they require

WHAT KIND OF DATA TO STORE

Every distributor and retailer has its own data specification.  It’s not possible to store your data in a way that fits perfectly with all of them.  What you can do, however, is store your data in way that makes it as easy as possible to export it in a way that works for them.  The key to this is having every conceivable bit of data stored and having it stored in a way that it can be manipulated to suit the requirements of others.  So, without further ado, here is a list of what you should be storing:

Product Level Data
Label Name
Barcode (UPC/EAN)
Catalogue ID
Disc Count
Track Count
Product Title
Display Artist Name
Primary Genre
Secondary Genre
Format
Parental Advisory
Physical Release Date
Digital Release Date
Original Release Date
Available Territories
C Line
P Line
Main Artist(s)
Featured Artist(s)

Track Level Data
Disc Number
Track Number
ISRC
Track Title
Version Info
Display Artist Name
Individual Sale Rights
Preview/Ringtone Start Time
Main Artist(s)
Featured Artist(s)

HOW TO STORE THE DATA

There are two recommended ways of storing your metadata – in a spreadsheet or in a database.  Setting up and managing a database is a big topic and not something we will delve into right now.  If you have no experience with database management, you’ll probably want to go for the spreadsheet option.  Alternatively, until we get around to having a more in depth look at database management on these pages, there are plenty of online resources to help you get started.

With that said, let’s take a look at the spreadsheet option.  If you have some kind of spreadsheet application, you’re all set.  If not, you can either purchase something like Microsoft Office, which will include Microsoft’s spreadsheet application, Excel, or you can go for a free alternative.  OpenOffice is very popular and can certainly handle the kind of tasks we’ll be looking at here.

Firstly, as we are so generous, we have created a sample metadata spreadsheet for you (saved in Microsoft’s .xls format).  Before reading on, grab it from here.  You are free to take this, adapt it to suit your needs and pass it on to your friends.  Please don’t try to sell it to anyone, that’s just not cricket.

Got the spreadsheet?  Ok, let’s continue.  I won’t reiterate what is already included in the spreadsheet, but I’ll give you some pointers on how to navigate your way around it.

The first worksheet (Metadata) is where you will enter all of your data.  It contains a column for each and every item on the list above.

The second worksheet (Glossary) tells you what should be entered in each of those columns.

The third and fourth worksheets (Reference – Genres, Reference – ISO Country Codes) are there to make your life a little easier when defining genres and available territories.

The final worksheet (EXAMPLE) simply shows you an example of how you should fill out the Metadata worksheet.

Once you have your spreadsheet setup and populated with all your data, it’s important to keep the data up to date with any changes/updates to the catalogue.  Data that is out of date or inaccurate is no good to anyone.

WHERE TO STORE THE DATA

Where do you think?  That’s right, store it on that hard drive that you are backing up regularly.  Compiling a spreadsheet full of your data is not a 5 minute job so, of all the things that could be lost, you don’t want it to be this!

THE ABILITY TO SUPPLY THE DATA TO ANYONE WHO NEEDS IT IN THE FORMAT THEY REQUIRE

As mentioned previously, it’s impossible to store your data in a way that meets everbody’s requirements without a little tweaking first.  Storing your data in the way that has been explained will put you in the best position possible.  Supplying your data to somebody may mean spending an hour or two renaming columns or combining fields, but none of that is too difficult with a bit of spreadsheet trickery (I’ll save that tutorial for another day!).

Storing your data in a database will allow much more flixebility but, again, let’s not try to do too much at once.

So there you have it.  We’ve looked at how to store your audio, artwork and metadata in a way that will ensure ease of access, security and adaptability.  If you can implement everything we’ve looked at here, you will already be well ahead of most companies out there and you will be well positioned to deal with whatever this crazy business can throw at you next!