When applying tags to a piece of music, whether a sound recording or a musical work, there are certain elements that are indisputable - such as musical key, BPM, and whether it's instrumental or acoustic. However, many other tags encompassing genre, sub-genre, mood, lyrical theme, etc., can be much more complex to navigate.

Matching recordings to their underlying compositions is an intricately complex music industry puzzle. While it's something that inherently seems like it should be fairly straight forward, this process poses significant challenges.

Unlike in industries where legal name is the norm, the party or person identifier can be complex in the music space. Consider the two standard data identifiers for names in music: International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) and Interested Party Information (IPI). Seems simple enough but only one of them (IPI) is the industry norm, and most of the time they don't travel together.

One might think that publishing data is all confirmed by the time an album is released, but it is frequently not the case. At the time of release, the label copy (core metadata) for the recording is often incomplete when it comes to songwriters and other participants.

When thinking about rights ownership data in music, the music publishing world is incredibly complex. There are a number of reasons for this, so let's take a look at the lifecycle of music publishing data and how it gets fragmented.