Getting your mp3 tags right helps!

[Pixieguts]

I'm someone who listens to a huge amount of independent/underground electronica and have downloaded a lot of music from Ning when it's been generously made available by the artists.

One thing I've noticed though is that the track titles and artist information are often wrong or even seriously missing from the mp3 file tags. I'm sure everyone here knows that almost any media player will allow you to enter correct track information into mp3 files before uploading.

If, like me, you don't listen to all your downloads immediately but go through and add them to your media library later, you often don't remember the details of files that are missing information. In these cases, I often have to just delete the tracks - what's the point of listening to music if you don't even know who the artist is any more?

In addition, there are so many listeners like me hooked up to 'scrobbling' sites like Last.fm (20 million listeners having their daily music listening stastically registered). This means that if I (or any other Last.fm listener) plays your music, you will automatically have an artist page generated at Last.fm and will start accruing a playcount with details of track titles and other information about listeners etc at that site. But this will only work if the mp3 files are tagged correctly.

It goes wider than this because these same people who might be listening to your music increasingly have their music listening activities at Last.fm 'fed' into other sites like Facebook. This is potentially extra promotion for your music on a bunch of sites without you having to lift a finger aside from correct initial tagging.

So, just a recommendation to my fellow artists to tag your mp3 files correctly if you can! :P

[JaWar]

This is fantastic information. Thank you for starting this forum. DJ Judge Mental presented a power-point presentation at the How to Make Money Online Seminar in early 2008 where he went through the process of how to properly tag your mp3's. His presentation was compelling to say the least as he fused details about the importance of properly tagging your mp3's as you have.