Artist roles and DisplayCredits

ERN-4 as well as the RIN 1.1 file format supports rich communication of roles and credits information. This supports the presentation of "liner notes" to consumers as well as classification of what a specific Contributor did in the process of writing or recording the music.

The main fields for this are Role, InstrumentType and DisplayCredits. While the former two are allowed value sets (that can be overwritten or specialised with a user-defined value, the latter is a free-form string. This article provides guidance on how to use these elements in conjunction with the name of the Contributor in question. 

DisplayCredits are intended to be shown, where deemed appropriate by the DSP, to end-users as a replacement for the Party’s name and their Role.

One simple example of these fields is shown below:

<SoundRecording>
	...
	<Contributor SequenceNumber="1">
		<ContributorPartyReference>P12345</ContributorPartyReference>
		<Role>ComposerLyricist</Role>
		<Role>Musician</Role>
		<InstrumentType>Guitar</InstrumentType>
		<InstrumentType>Voice</InstrumentType>
	<DisplayCredits>John: Music (melody and words), Vocals and Guitar</DisplayCredits>
	</Contributor>
 
	<Contributor SequenceNumber="2">
		<ContributorPartyReference>P54321</ContributorPartyReference>
		<Role>ComposerLyricist</Role>
		<Role>Musician</Role>
		<Role>BackgroundVocalist</Role>
		<InstrumentType>Drums</InstrumentType>
		<DisplayCredits>Paul: Music and Drums</DisplayCredits>
	</Contributor>
	<Contributor SequenceNumber="3">
		<ContributorPartyReference>P15243</ContributorPartyReference>
		<Role>BackgroundVocalist</Role>
		<DisplayCredits>Additional vocals provided by Yoko</DisplayCredits>
	</Contributor>
	...
</SoundRecording>

As shown above, the DisplayCredits does include the name of the credited Contributor. This is to allow the "credited name" to differ from the official name the Contributor uses. 

Note that in the second Contributor one of the formally identified roles (BackgroundVocalist) is not mentioned in the DisplayCredits string. This indicates that the background vocalisations are considered as not important enough to be worthy of inclusion in the display credit string — but as Paul did perform as a BackgroundVocalist, his contribution is listed.

Multiple Credits

If, for one Contributor there are multiple DisplayCredits, there are two possible approaches. If the label wishes the DSP to be able to directly link a RoleCode/InstrumentType combination to a specific DisplayCredits string, it may be necessary to create two (or more) Contributor composites. This is shown in the example on the left.

If, however, a direct mapping from a specific RoleCode/InstrumentType combination to a specific DisplayCredits string is not required, multiple DisplayCredits strings can be included into a single Contributor composite, as shown in the example below.

<Contributor SequenceNumber="1">
   <ContributorPartyReference>P12345</ContributorPartyReference>
   <Role>ComposerLyricist</Role>
   <Role>Musician</Role>
   <InstrumentType>Guitar</InstrumentType>
   <DisplayCredits>John: Music and Guitar</DisplayCredits>
</Contributor>
<Contributor SequenceNumber="2">
   <ContributorPartyReference>P12345</ContributorPartyReference>
   <Role>LeadVocalist</Role>
   <DisplayCredits>John: Vocals</DisplayCredits>
</Contributor>

<Contributor SequenceNumber="1">
   <ContributorPartyReference>P12345</ContributorPartyReference>
   <Role>ComposerLyricist</Role>
   <Role>Musician</Role>
   <Role>LeadVocals</Role>
   <InstrumentType>Guitar</InstrumentType>
   <DisplayCredits>John: Music, Vocals and Guitar</DisplayCredits>
   <DisplayCredits>John: Noise from the mouth</DisplayCredits>
</Contributor>

In addition to the above it is possible to have multiple DisplayCredits in different languages.