Back when I was making music rather than writing about it, one of my earliest supporters was a DJ called Eddie Eaze Coleman. He was also a producer, a songwriter and a man who knew a vast amount on the business side of music – and I’m very much a fan of listening to people who know what they’re talking about.

One of his frequent complaints was about metadata. He was the songwriter on hundreds of records during his career, including one of my own. And anytime a record label failed to list him on the digital stores, it drove him into something of a rage. It made him absolutely crazy.

Frankly, I didn’t blame him. In my case, he was crucial to the song “Standing On The Precipice” coming together. He signed it after listening to a short instrumental demo I posted on Facebook. He wrote the song. He got Chanelle to sing on it. He even got it released on a label he was very closely associated with.

In other words, he was central to the release. Yet far too many times, I saw him being crucial in the building of a song – yet his name wouldn’t appear anywhere in the metadata or anywhere else.

To give you some context, he died back in 2018. It’s still a problem today. And Eddie’s suspicion at the time was it suited the industry not to fix this problem – that too many people benefited from it. I’m beginning to understand what he meant…