Communicating DisplayArtists and Contributors

Musical releases and recordings carry two pieces of information, DisplayArtist and Contributor, related to the musicians that have created the release/recording and under whose name the release/recording is released to consumers, respectively.

For instance, a recording “Cruel Summer” has been released under the name of “Taylor Swift”. However, the people creating this recording include, besides Taylor Swift: Jack Antonoff, Michael Riddleberger and Serban Ghenea (and others).

As Taylor Swift is the party under whose name the recording is released, she is the recording’s “display artist” whereas Jack Antonoff, Michael Riddleberger and Serban Ghenea are just “contributors”; they contributed to the recording as co-producer, drummer and mixing engineer, respectively, but the recording is not marketed under their names.

However, the main artist is usually also a contributor. For “Cruel Summer”, Taylor Swift was the lead vocalist, a writer and a co-producer.

To communicate this situation in ERN the following XML tags should be used (showing only Taylor Swift’s and Michael Riddleberger’s contributions for brevity):

<Party>
  <PartyReference>P1</PartyReference>
  <PartyName>
    <FullName>Taylor Swift</FullName>
  </PartyName>
</Party>
<Party>
  <PartyReference>P2</PartyReference>
  <PartyName>
    <FullName Michael Riddleberger></FullName>
  </PartyName>
</Party>
…
<DisplayArtistName>Taylor Swift</DisplayArtistName>
<DisplayArtist>
  <ArtistPartyReference>P1</ArtistPartyReference>
  <DisplayArtistRole>MainArtist</DisplayArtistRole>
</DisplayArtist>
<Contributor>
  <ContributorPartyReference>P1</ContributorPartyReference>
  <Role><Value>Vocalist</Value></Role>
  <Role><Value>StudioProducer</Value></Role>
  <Role><Value>ComposerLyricist</Value></Role>
</Contributor>
<Contributor>
  <ContributorPartyReference>P2</ContributorPartyReference>
  <Role>
    <Value>Musician</Value>
    <InstrumentType>DrumKit</InstrumentType>
  </Role>
</Contributor>

Multiple display credits

The benefit of separating display artist and contributor data into separate tags becomes more evident in cases where a display artist/contributor has different display names. One such example is the song “Sardaukar Levenbrech” recorded by Grimes and written by the same person, albeit under her legal name Claire Elise Boucher. Both names are a facet of a single public persona and, therefore, there is only one ISNI for Grimes/Boucher: 0000 0003 5635 8936. The following XML snippet could be used for “Sardaukar Levenbrech”:

<Party>
  <PartyReference>P100</PartyReference>
  <PartyName>
    <FullName>Grimes</FullName>
  </PartyName>
</Party
…
<DisplayArtistName>Grimes</DisplayArtistName>
<DisplayArtist>
  <ArtistPartyReference>P100</ArtistPartyReference>
  <DisplayArtistRole>MainArtist</DisplayArtistRole>
</DisplayArtist>

<Contributor>
  <ContributorPartyReference>P100</ContributorPartyReference>
  <Role><Value>Vocalist</Value></Role>
</Contributor>

<Contributor>
  <ContributorPartyReference>P100</ContributorPartyReference>
  <Role><Value>ComposerLyricist</Value></Role>
  <DisplayCredits>
    <DisplayCreditParty>P100<DisplayCreditParty>
    <NameUsedInDisplayCredit>
      Claire Elise Boucher
    </NameUsedInDisplayCredit>
  </DisplayCredits>
</Contributor>

The above example also shows that the absence of a DisplayCredits tag the full name from the Party composite is to be used.

Additional information on the DisplayArtistName tag can be found here .

The ArtisticRole tag in the DisplayArtist composite is strongly recommended to not being used as this would allow a message sender a second approach to signalling the same information as using Contributor/Role – which reduces the interoperability of ERN implementations. This tag has been retained in ERN 4.3.1 for backwards compatibility reasons and is expected to be deprecated and removed in a future version of ERN.

As shown above, it is recommended to use the Contributor tag for parties’ (artistic) contributions.

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