My understanding here is… not at present. Maybe in the future and that some kinds of privacy respecting opt-in/opt-out will likely be offered.
Where it gets complex is with our likely arrangements with PROs/collections agencies etc. for various royalty payments and how album/track credits might be displayed in the future. This doesn’t specifically address track downloads but I’ll return to that at the end.
Everything I’ve seen/heard so far btw shows that people at resonate recognise and value respecting privacy on this, but there are a couple of competing demands that will need addressing.
First, legal name for composers/performers is a requirement in relation to the PROs etc. It’s part of the metadata that connects various industry processes together to make sure people get credited and paid properly. However, if you’re registered with a PRO you can also register pseudonyms which help preserve a degree of anonymity. For example, Bono is credited as Bono and not his real name.
If you’re registered (e.g. you have a label/publisher, you’ve released stuff to streaming platforms via e.g. CD Baby, Amuse etc., or you’ve registered your works independently) then you will probably either be credited to your releases under your legal name or a registered pseudonym.
If you’re not registered (and have no plans to) then it doesn’t really make any difference to you and should be able to use any name/pseudonym you like. I think there’s an update to the uploader guidance happening to help clarify this too.
So… you may already know all of that… for resonate, where this matters, to the best of my knowledge, is when we connect to metadata services tied to collections agencies etc. This is entirely necessary to be able to provide music catalogues by more established labels/artists and attention to making sure metadata is accurate and works properly will be necessary.
In this future world I expect we will want to (and I personally would encourage) publicly crediting contributions to a recording (writers, performers, studio engineers, etc.) such as tidal is currently doing.
The names entered in metadata (especially writers and performers) would form part of this and I expect would therefore become public. It’s likely that some form of opt-out or opt-in may be offered. Again, everything I’ve heard points to people here understanding and respecting privacy.
So hopefully that’s a bit of background on if/where/why things like legal names might be (or not) required and how this metadata might be made public (presuming a reasonable opt-in/opt-out procedure is also in place) in the future.
What I don’t know (and haven’t seen any discussion of previously) is how metadata might be processed for track downloads.
Personally I’d encourage us to add as much metadata to track downloads as possible so that credits and details are preserved. I also recognise doing this in a privacy respecting way but whether we presume this is covered by artists providing names/pseudonyms they’re happy to be made public or by another opt-in/opt-out option I have no real thoughts or suggestions.
Audio files can have embedded metadata and I’m unsure how the upload process works in relation to this. I know it can pull metadata out as we sometimes see it when uploading in title/artist/etc fields but I don’t know if/how this is stripped or preserved in the files we store on our servers. e.g., does this get overwritten by the values entered on the upload forms etc?
As the download facility is currently being specified and we hope will be reimplemented soon it will be useful to think about if/how metadata will be handled for file downloads.
So… at present, there is no track download facility, but… in the future, privacy respecting metadata will need thinking about.
Certainly not a complete answer but hope that helps somewhat. Also, as some of this is work in progress, it’s very open to contribution and further thought/discussion.
