Listen up, youngsters. Back in my day we had a thing called album art. You’d buy a record and just stare at that thing for hours on end. You’d read the liner notes and check the credits for familiar names. These days Discogs offers a reasonable approximation of the latter, but streaming services have been pretty lacking on that front.
Tidal introduced a new feature this week designed to offer a bit more insight into those folks working behind the scenes to make the studio magic happen. Rather than serving up the info on an album by album basis, however, it’s accessed through the artist’s page. That means information is going to be a lot more prevalent for more prominent artists. For more obscure studio musicians and such, Discogs is still your friend.
From there, you can filter songs based on the role they played on a given track — so, songwriter, producer, musician, etc. There’s also a miscellaneous category for things like art work and A&R — those things that are a little less directly involved in the songwriting process. It’s a nice step in recognizing some of the information that’s been lost as albums have made the shift from physical formats to digital streaming.
It’s also a nice little differentiator for a streaming service that could certainly use it.