accomplished engineers or producers like
him, or his friend David Bottrill (Muse, Pe-
ter Gabriel, Tool), have to be touting their
work on social media so that people know
they’re still active. “We have to spend more
time social media-ing about who we are,
and we’re not about that, but in order to let
people know we’ve done something, we
have to do this shameless self-promotion,”
he laments.
“So, there is sort of a single underlying
problem, which is the lack of acknowledge-
ment for the work that you do, and then
there’s the reality that we live and die by our
credits. People hire you because they like
what you work on,” comments recording
and mix engineer Ryan McCambridge, who
has credits on records by Rush, Metric, Glass
Tiger, and others. “I think the problem differs
depending on where you are in your career.
If you were just starting out, this is not a
problem for you because your credits are so
insignificant that it doesn’t really matter…
It would become an issue, but it wouldn’t
be at the time. If it’s, you know, name your
A-list producer, it also wouldn’t be [as much
of ] an issue. The issue is this middle ground
where you’re working on stuff that is totally
credible and that people are listening to,
and yet no one will ever know that you
worked on it.”
About this, Richardson adds, “When I
was 20 or 25 years old and I began to get
my first breaks, if had to go through then
what I do now, it would be very difficult
to have a career. So, this is about making
our craft healthier.” For example, if there’s a
young and talented engineer that mixes an
exceptional album that makes other artists,
producers, and engineers go, “Who mixed
this?”, too often, it’s too hard to answer that
simple question.
“The way this stuff would work is every-
body moves up the totem pole,” continues
McCambridge. “The assistant engineer
needs those credits to be an engineer, and
the engineer needs those credits to be-
come a producer, and so on.”
But maybe the problem doesn’t rest solely
with Spotify and Apple Music not featur-
ing thorough credits. After all, Netflix
features very minimal credits on its own
interface for movies and TV shows. It also
often shrinks the credits roll at the end of
a movie in favour of showing you some-
thing else to watch, making the traditional
credits roll pointlessly small on most peo-
ple’s screens. The big difference, though,
is that the film and TV industry has IMDB.
com — a well-known, searchable, interac-
tive, and amazingly comprehensive digital
database of credits for anyone involved in
the making of TV and movies.
If you’re a sound mixer or sound effects
editor for TV, IMDB is effectively your busi-
ness card. There is no equivalent for that in
the music industry. The closest comparable
is Allmusic.com, but it does not compare
to IMDB in its comprehensiveness. To ex-
emplify this, I just checked the credits for
Polaris Prize-winner Lido Pimienta’s new
album, Miss Colombia. What’s included in
the credits on AllMusic? Nothing. Not even
the producer.
RYAN McCAMBRIDGE
A newcomer that may offer the answer
is an Australia-based company and website
called Jaxsta. It’s still in beta mode, but it
already claims to be the “world’s most com-
prehensive resource of official music credits.”
The company has partnership agreements
with two of the major labels, as well as indie
label collective Merlin and a number of
other associations, publishers, and royalty
agencies. If it gains traction in the industry,
it’s a promising music-focused answer to
IMDB. (Continuing my test, it told me the
producers of Miss Columbia are Pimienta and
Prince Nifty, that Nifty was also the engineer,
and that Andrés Nusser was the mixer.)
Jaxsta notwithstanding, McCambridge
doesn’t let Spotify and Apple Music off the
hook. He points out that, crucially, they
play a role that no one video service does,
even Netflix. The key difference is music
streaming services like Spotify and Apple
Music each have almost the entire catalog
of recorded music in their libraries at all
times. As such, music fans typically sub-
scribe to just one service and it becomes
their main point of contact with all music.
Movie and TV streaming services, on the
other hand, do not have overlapping librar-
ies. Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, etc. each
have just a small, exclusive, and temporary
sliver of history’s filmography.
“So, to me, sure we could do that,”
McCambridge says of an IMDB-style
database for music credits, “but really and
truly it should be the Apple Musics and
Spotifys of the world who are figuring out
that problem.”
Of course, such a project would be
a significant undertaking for any of the
streaming services. And as sad as it may
be to say, they are not beholden to the
interests of music makers. Spotify and
Apple Music are beholden to their sub-
scribers and to the music rights holders
that license them, which is primarily the
labels who own the master recordings,
as well as the publishers/PROs.
“They don’t care. How long ago did
they stop putting the [producers and
engineers] names on the backs of vinyl
or CDs?” Richardson says about the re-
cord labels’ willingness to take up this
fight.
“You know, David Bottrill is an artist.
I think I am. I think Mike Fraser is. I think
Randy Staub, Bob Rock, Bob Ezrin, all
of us are. So, I think you need to start
CIRPA back up and go with one voice,”
Richardson adds, referring to the Ca-
nadian Independent Record Producers
Association, which was co-founded by
his father, the legendary producer Jack
Richardson, in 1971. CIRPA eventually
became CIMA (the Canadian Indepen-
dent Music Association) and its focused
shifted to the interests of independent
labels, management companies, and
agencies.
Richardson is hopeful that if en-
gineers, producers, and other profes-
sionals involved in the music-making
process can form a new association and
speak with a united voice, it would give
them more sway with streaming ser-
vices, labels, government, and others. In
fact, he and Juno-winning engineer/pro-
ducer John “Beetle” Bailey are currently
discussing how to make it happen.
When it comes down to it, this con-
versation is about two things: giving
credit where it’s due, because it’s the
right thing to do; and second, it’s about
maintaining the health of the music
ecosystem for the next generation of
engineers and others.
“It’s the inability for people to find
you and for them to recognize your
contributions to a record,” McCambridge
says in closing. “That is the heart of the
problem.”
Michael Raine is the Senior Editor of
Canadian Musician.
CANADIAN MUSICIAN 11