IsCredited and MayBeShared

Most musicians want to be “officially” credited for the work they do – and in most cases they also have a right to this. There are, however, exceptions. Billy Preston famously played the electric piano at the Beatles’ 1970 rooftop concert – but he was not officially credited for this performance; the only musicians to be formally credited were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.

When displaying the credits for the recordings from the rooftop concert set only the four Beatles should be listed. But a DSP may wish to link these recordings from Billy Preston’s page or allow those recordings to be part of a search for Billy Preston.

To differentiate between credited and uncredited contributions, the ERN message provides the boolean IsCredited flag in the Contribution (and, from ERN 4.3 onwards, the EditionContribution) composite.

There may be circumstances, however, where this information may not be directly shared with consumers or other third parties, where for instance a search result should not include a non-credited (yet still involved) musician. A DSP may still wish to use the information when programming its playlists.

To support this – comparativelty rare – situation, the aforementioned IsCredited flag may carry a MayBeShared attribute. If the attribute is not provided, the crediting information may be shared with consumers (e.g. any searches may include the relevant non-credited musician).

The table below documents what a recipient of a NewReleaseMessage with the IsCredited and MayBeShared flags is meant to do (absence of a tag/flag is functionally equivalent to setting the tag/flag to true):

The data may always be used for sales/usage reporting.